The message about your account
Meet a frightening message about your money, check it for yourself by a route nobody else chose, and deal with it — without having to out-think whoever wrote it.
This course has said one thing over and over: being taken in is a matter of circumstance rather than cleverness, and the habits that actually protect you do not ask you to spot anything.
So here is a practice computer with a message on it that has fooled a great many careful people, sitting next to a real one from the same organization. You are not being asked to prove you can tell them apart. You are being asked what you do next.
Key points
- Reach a bank or credit union by a route of your own, rather than the one a message chose for you.
- Check a frightening claim for yourself in about two minutes.
- Put a message that is not what it says where it belongs, without losing anything you needed.
What to remember
- None of that depended on spotting a clever fake, which is the point — the fakes improve every year and the habit does not have to. Your own route is the number on the back of your card, an address you type yourself, or a bookmark you made on a calm day. Suspicious emails can be forwarded to reportphishing@apwg.org, and scam texts to 7726, which is free on every large network. What makes the number on your card worth having is that nobody can redirect it.
- Honestly — how was that?
Try this
Open your own bank or credit union by typing the name from the back of your card, and put a bookmark on it. From that day on the bookmark is your front door, and no message can move it.
Practice: The message about your account. Your first lesson is free, with no account or card; the rest are part of a Lantern plan. Interactive lessons require JavaScript.