Email scams are getting more and more sophisticated all the time. Here's a bit of a refresher on what to look out for to ensure you don't get caught by a phisherman, by Sarah Greenaway

I am Mrs Irina Gutavo a Cancer patient, i was informed by my doctor that i have a few weeks to live, I hereby give to you my £20 Million Pounds to set up a Charity Organization to help people that are in needs. Please respond for further instructions. Sincerely. Mrs Irina Gutavo.

Admittedly, I receive these kinds of emails all the time, but this time I got to wondering.... 'Do people really fall for this stuff?'. I mean, they must if I keep receiving email after email after email telling me that I have inherited vast wads of cash and that I've been carefully selected to take up the most lucrative investment opportunity of all time. Then I remembered... I was nearly caught out once. I had advertised my car on carsguide.com.au and got a bite from a prospective buyer who seemed legit. We traded emails (his was a Hotmail account) and we got to the point where the deal seemed signed and sealed. As what seemed like a bit of an afterthought, the buyer contacted me to ask  if I could arrange a transfer of $400 through Western Union to pay a representative to pick up the car as the buyer said he was overseas and the person he has initially arranged to pick it up was unavailable - okay, fair enough. In the interim, he sent me details of his payment through Paypal and asked if I could wire the $400 to the representative before his money hit my account. It was at this stage that I (thankfully) spotted the scam. The Paypal remittance looked authentic but was sent from an odd-looking email address, so I looked up ‘carsguide scam' and found that I was one of countless people who had been (or nearly been) swindled. Cyberthieves are getting more and more sophisticated all the time and it can be difficult to spot the scams, so here's a bit of info to help you identify the most common scams and assess whether or not an email is dodgy. Common scams (according to The Australian Communications and Media Authority) Common scams to beware of and avoid include:

1. 'Nigerian' scams – which appear to come from overseas and ask you to send money in return for a large lump sum being transferred to your bank account
2. 'pump 'n' dump' stock scams – which are sent as spam emails claiming to be from a successful investor who has made huge profits investing in a particular stock, and needs to offload some of it
3. ‘internet dumping’ - where some 'free' adult sites download automatic internet diallers that clock up a huge phone bill without your knowledge
4. work-at-home schemes, lottery wins and prizes that require you to send money before claiming them
5. pharmaceutical scams - offering ‘amazing' products that claim to boost your health, appearance or virility.
6. phishing emails that are sent from falsified or 'spoofed' email addresses. Many phishing emails often claim to be from a bank, online retailer or credit card company. These emails direct recipients to a website that looks like the real website of a retailer or financial institution, which is designed to encourage the visitor to reveal financial details such as credit card numbers, account names and passwords or other personal information.

How to assess if you're the recipient of a dodgy email:

1. If the email is from a 'free' email account (hotmail.com, live.com, yahoo.com) treat it with suspicion. In the example I opened the article with, the name given was Lady Irina Gutavo, but the email given was gutavodynasty@live.ru (Windows Live, Russia). In fact, the sender's email address is usually the first sign that somethings not quite right. If an organisation is emailing you, be mindful that legitimate institutions that send out emails to their customers generally send them from an email address that’s associated with their website.
2. Be wary of an email that tells you to forward the correspondence to everyone in your address book.
3. Look for a name and contact details. Is there  a phone number for someone you can reach out to to discuss whatever the email is offering you?
4. Is the sender SCREAMING AT YOU or adding lots of exclamation points!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!? If so, it could be very well be dodgy as legitimate businesses don't tend to communicate this way.
5. Is the email more persuasive than informative?
6. Is it offering something that's too good to be true?
7. Is there a sense or urgency or high priority to the email, i.e. limited offer, important information, act now, get rich quick or was it sent as 'High Importance'?
8. Is there an offer of free money in exchange for personal information? - If so, you're likely to have a scam on your hands.
9. Hover over any links that are provided - does the URL matches what’s displayed in the email? If not, it may be a case of link manipulation, a tactic used by phishers to create bogus (and often very convincing) sites for the purposes of stealing your personal information.

A few more useful tips:

1. Ensure you don't fall prey to a phishing scam by checking off the list of tell tale scam signs above before you click any links!
2. Virtually any email chain letter you receive (i.e., any message forwarded multiple times before it got to you) is more likely to be false than true. You should automatically be skeptical of chain letters.
3. Do a search to see if the organisation they are purporting to be from exists and if the claims they're making are factual.
4. Hoaxers usually try every means available to make their lies believable -- e.g., mimicking a journalistic style, attributing the text to a 'legitimate' source, or implying that powerful corporate or government interests have tried to keep the information from you.

Take that, Mrs Irina Gutavo! (unless, of course, you really do have 20million pounds to give me...) Sarah