By now most people are aware that you should always be extra vigilante when receiving email’s appearing to be from your bank or asking for any personal details/passwords to be sent via email. However, sometimes your SPAM filter doesn’t pick these up and it isn’t always possible to tell if the email is legitimate. Here are a few simple checks which you can do to confirm if the email is legitimate.

1. View the full headers of the email, this will show the source server of the email, if this is a hostname of an ISP/non banking authority then theres a good chance that this is a fraudulent email.
2. Spelling mistakes. Believe it or not, the people who create these email’s don’t seem to have the time to check them for spelling mistakes.
3. Outdated company logos, alot of the phishing mail’s which people send have been around for a few years meaning that banks have updated their logos.
4. Disguised hyperlinks, you can create any link in HTML to look like it takes you to the legitimate website but if you hover over this and see where it actually is attempting to take you, you will probably notice it is not the link you were expecting.

Of course following these steps the email may look legitimate, but if you are still not sure then ask somebody else to take a look over it, just in case there is anything which you may have missed.

If you do think you may have entered your details into a phishing website then be sure to contact your bank immediately to change any logins which you use. If you use the same password for any of your other online access then make sure you change those also, if they know your email address to send you the email and your common passwords chances are they will try to access many other sites with the same details.