TIPS ON HOW TO AVOID SPAM AND SCAM ON THE INTERNET

As a result of the recent increase in the activities of cyber criminals with regards to email scams, there is an urgent need to avoid falling victims to such acts.
Below are a number of suggestions that can help prevent your email address from becoming a target for cyber criminals popularly known as scams and spammers.
 Do not respond to email requests to validate or confirm any of your account details such as banks, eBay, PayPal. Some of them do this to gain access into your account. To be sure if a link is legitimate or not type the website or URL into your browser, remember do not click on the link because it might be fake link to phishing websites.
 Do not click on unusual links. Confirm the sender did send the email if it looks suspicious.
 Never give out your login details to anyone.
 Create two email accounts, one for personal use the other for other for public locations.
 Never use the same email for both official and personal purposes.
 Don’t open your spam messages so far you don’t know the sender though most valid mails enter our spam box and most spam messages enter our inbox so you have to be careful to know which one is spam or not.
 Never reply any spam message because if you do, you will be confirming that your email address is real.
 When replying to news group postings, do add your email address.
 Never buy products from spammers, because they depend on little percentage of people that respond to spam and buy goods. When spamming becomes unprofitable and they will have less income to continue. Would you risk giving your account details to unknown source?
 When filling any form check the site privacy policy to ensure it will not be sold or passed to other companies.
 Never use your personal email for official duties.
 Make sure your anti-virus is updated.
 Don’t open, the message that you want to report.
 On the Actions menu, click Forward as Attachment, or press CTRL+ALT+F.
 In the To line, type the e-mail address of the company to whom you are reporting the phishing message. Some e-mail addresses that you can use to report suspicious mail are:
o reportphishing@antiphishing.org it is sent to Anti-Phishing Working Group.
o spam@uce.gov goes to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Click Send.