To Delete or Not Delete, That is the Question
Several weeks ago, I started to receive various emails from Chase regarding my account. I’m always a bit hesitant about phishing schemes, and never click on a link inside an email from my bank or credit card companies. Instead, I type out the URL into my browser and go to the site to determine if there is really action required. It turns out, according to The Boston Globe, I’m not the only one, except people aren’t bothering to check to see if the emails are accurate by going to their bank’s site. Instead, they are ignoring the emails, simply deleting them.
This is all well and good, unless action is required. I didn’t really think about it, but this would be why Chase also called and left a message on my answering machine about the action required on my account (they needed me to change my username to comply with system upgrades being put into place).
The problem becomes when we become so distrustful of what we receive in the email, it becomes absolutely useless to us. What alternatives are the banks going to have other than to resort to traditional methods of phone calls or mailings? My recommendation is to not ignore email which apparently comes from your bank, but to confirm it. Just open a new browser window and see if action is required on your account. There’s no reason to potential messages, just be careful and don’t click on links within.
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April 28th, 2008 at 4:47 pm
This has recently become an issue for me. I have gotten to the point that I no longer will open anything that says Sallie Mae.
I recently got a student loan through them and almost as soon as I did, I got an email from someone saying they were Sallie Mae that wanted me to download a PDF file and enter my SSN to unlock it. I am way leary about putting my SSN in anywhere so I decided to check it out first.
I manually typed out the web address they had in the email and I happened to notice that something didn’t look quite right. I also happened to have the regular Sallie Mae web address in my bookmarks as my wife has had an account with them for a long time. I went there and sure enough, I realized what was wrong. The font for sallie mae was different. I checked the mailing address and telephone # on the Official website and those did not match up either.
What made it more suspicious was the next week I got another email from Sallie Mae, this one asking me to do the same thing but telling me to disconnect from the internet completely before I put in my SSN so it could not be broadcast.
At that point, I decided that I would no longer try to decifer what is real or fake from Sallie Mae. I ordered a paper statement from now on, and I will call them directly if I need anything.