A new crop of email scams making the rounds follow the 2 key principles every scam artist learns: make the scam relevant to the concerns of consumers today, and attempt to be plausible.

Practice your scam spotting skills to avoid being ripped off by the following emails:

1. The Federal Bailout Claim – “You’ve qualified for a $7,500 recession aid credit line”

This scam plays off the hopes of consumers struggling with debt and entices people to fall further behind with overspending.

Look at the clues:

1. Check the sender’s email address. You aren’t going to get a legitimate email from @judgescheek.net

2. Never click on a link in an email from an unknown sender. This email has three links: ‘Click here to view images’, ‘click to activate’ and click to access their ‘instant removal link’. All take you to a malicious site

TIP: Hover over links to see the actual URL displayed – in this scam, the URL incorporates your own name.

Don’t try this at home: To test the scam for you, I clicked on the links. Click to activate actually took me to a site that offered credit reporting. The Instant removal link took me to an entirely blank webpage that displayed a canned thank you message.

2. The discount drug offer with the “Guaranteed Lowest Price”

When budgets get tight affording medications gets harder and the temptation to find bargains online increases and scammers crawl out of the woodwork. (see my blog In Sour Economy, Some Scale Back on Medications)

Look at the clues:

1. Check the sender and their email address. The sender appears to be a person – not a company, and their email address doesn’t even match their company URL.

2. 3) and 4) The spam is full of nonsense words and grammatical errors.

5. Never click on a link in an email from an unknown sender. If you haven’t heard of an pharmacy called kjn.rxstand.cn, and you don’t know Leida, don’t click.

3) Another twist on the old “There is a problem with your account”

This scam is practically an antique – but so many people continue to fall for it that it gets pulled off the moth-balls for another found of consumers frequently.

Look at the clues:

1. Check the sender and their email address. In this case, the sender’s account has several obvious scam attributes. The sender isn’t PayPal, it’s ‘int.paypal’ and that ‘.gr’ at the end is the country domain extension for Greece. Pleeeze!

2. The service doesn’t know who you are. The To: address is blank, and in the body of the message you’re ‘Dear member’.

3. The email is URGENT. Scammers hope that in your haste, you’ll leave your common sense behind.

4. You haven’t taken the action claimed – in this case you haven’t notified PayPal that you forgot your password.

5. Never click on a link in an email from an unknown sender. – In an email as phony as a wooden nickel you’re guaranteed trouble.

Email scams aren’t going away, but YOU don’t have to become a victim. Check out my blog Common e-mail scams, and use the practice examples there to test your skills.

Linda