Take some caution whenever you got an e-mail invitations to join social networking websites
By at December 22, 2009 | 9:27 pm | Print
Take some caution whenever you got an e-mail invitations to join social networking websites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or MySpace before joining them. Even if you know the sender and name of a social network to which you’ve been invited, before you click on an invitation response link, take few minutes because it could be misleading.
Some Tips:
First see yourself that the invitation link is going directly to the social network website and not somewhere else trying to “phish” for your personal information! For checking this you can copy and paste URLs into your web browser instead of clicking invite links, as there are many tricks to hide the true web addresses in e-mail messages.
Even when you copy and paste URLs into a web browser, before going to the websites, look in the browser’s address bar for any text such as “redirect” or “goto”. These may be signs of someone trying to redirect you to a misleading website.
Suppose you got some invite link in your e-mail message for a some unknown social networking site.
http://translate.myspace.com/translate?
u=stopbadware.org&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&sl=es&tl=en
Since the e-mail says it came from Myspace, and the web address contains “myspace.com”, this will take you to a page on Myspace’s website. But If you visit the above link you will go somewhere else…
This misleading link was just an example and fairly easy to detect. Real spam e-mails use lots of other tricks for hiding true web addresses. Instead of copying and pasting links, it may prove even safer to just visit website homepages directly, skipping invitation links, and then asking senders to be re-invited as their friend.
Don’t:
When you access the social networking website, if it ask questions such as the following during the signup process?
Social Security Number say no this.
Mother’s Maiden Name . Say no to this.
Never give:name or password to another e-mail account so the site can notify all your contacts to join the social network this way misleading sites can use your account to send e-mail spam to all your contacts under your name.
Your credit card or bank account number unless you’re signing up for subscription/premium services, never give this information.