When one looks wrong

Exactly what to do with a suspicious email, without ever having to work out whether it is genuine.

Most advice about suspicious email asks you to become an expert — to spot the odd address, the wrong logo, the link that is not what it claims. You do not have to be any of that.

There is one move that is safe whether the message is genuine or not, and it is the same move every time.

Key points

• Deal with a suspicious message without deciding whether it is genuine
• Reach a company by a route you chose: your app, your typed address, the number on your card
• Sort the ordinary signs from the ones actually worth stopping at

What to remember

• Report and leave, then go to the company your own way. The order matters less than the fact that you never used their route.
• Every safe answer has the same shape: you chose the route. Every unsafe one has the same shape: they did.

Try this

Turn your card over and put the telephone number from the back of it into your phone’s contacts, under the bank’s name. That one small job makes the safe move easy the next time something arrives in a hurry.

Practice: When one looks wrong. Your first lesson is free, with no account or card; the rest are part of a Lantern plan. Interactive lessons require JavaScript.

Related guides

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• You clicked something you wish you had not — the first hour
• Fill in a bank’s fraud report and be rung back
• Tell the bank, at ten past two in the morning