cowudders14

Found this site recently: It's essentially a test to see if you would get 'phished' and how susceptible you are. I got 9/10, as did a mate of mine who tried it. My wife got the full 10!

http://survey.mailfrontier.com/survey/quiztest.html
Let's know your results!

__________________
Moo! I'm mooey!

Cadwiz

I got hooked on 3 out of 10. I must be an easy mark.

__________________
Semper Fi

maleficent

I got an 8 out of 10 --

All those emails go to spam, go directly to spam, do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars.

__________________

djtestudo

7 of 10 right, and two more I chose poorly, but could have gone either way, and likely would have deleted anyway.

__________________
"Final thought: I just rented Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine. Frankly, it was the worst sports movie I've ever seen."
--Peter Schmuck, The (Baltimore) Sun

punx1325

I got an 8 out of 10 and the ones I missed looked fake to me. I guess I am just too careful.

__________________
If something seems too good to be true, then it probably is....

smarm

10 for 10. It helps that I have received a large number of these already.

dogzilla

9 of 10. I missed the CitiBank one.

mingusfingers

5/10. Ouch.

__________________
Still Looking

Xepidemic

6/10 damn

Karby

6/10...
whoa...i thought i was better than that...

__________________
~my karma ran over my dogma.~

BigGov

10/10

A few were kinda tricky.

__________________
One day an Englishman, a Scotsman, and an Irishman walked into a pub together. They each bought a pint of Guinness. Just as they were about to enjoy their creamy beverage, three flies landed in each of their pints. The Englishman pushed his beer away in disgust. The Scotsman fished the fly out of his beer and continued drinking it, as if nothing had happened. The Irishman, too, picked the fly out of his drink but then held it out over the beer and yelled "SPIT IT OUT, SPIT IT OUT, YOU BASTARD!"

Xepidemic

can you give us some hints on what to look for please

Latch

8/10... not too bad.

maleficent

The one for earthlink had some spellling errors in it - that should have been a dead give-away that it was wrong...

__________________

Nazggul

9/10 here

Usually The status bar tells you the actual link that you will be directed to or straight IP addresses instead of domain names. Those are dead give aways. Hyphenated domains are different. For example: http://service-visa.com is not a sub domain of Visa it is a completely different domain, while http://service.visa.com is a subdomain of Visa.

The one I missed on was Earthlink, i think I was just impatient as usual.

Fun stuff. I will send this out to my employees.

__________________
"If something has to give then it always will."

-- Editors

scoobydugan

6/10 but the 4 i got wrong i answered as being fraud...so i guess I'm a little too cautious.

santafe5000

9 out of 10. My miss was saying a legit was fake. Got all the fakes. I'm leery of all
requests for updating info. Can't be too careful.

__________________
When all else fails, QUIT.

KMA-628

9 out of 10, the CitiBank one got me.

A true PayPal e-mail will never ask you to click a link (link's can be spoofed). It always tells you to log into your account and the "message" is usally in the upper-left.

I delete anything that says, "we need to verify..." And if I question it, I call the source first before I click on a link. I also like to read the source code behind the e-mails as it tells you a lot about the e-mail (i.e. spoofed links, source website/URL, etc).

Got bit once, don't plan on it happening again.

__________________
Before you criticize someone, you need to walk a mile in their shoes. That way, if they get angry at you.......you're a mile away.......and they're barefoot.

Trisk

9 out of 10. I thought the Microsoft one at the top was fake.

I almost got the Citibank one wrong but I just couldn't get past the suspicious looking link.

Anyway, if you're really scared of being scammed, you could just go to the actual site once you've gotten the email and make sure everything's fine (for example, instead of clicking on the link to paypal in the email, type paypal.com into your browser). THat way you know you're at the right place.

MSD

Kind of hard to tell if they're real if the link is to a javascript popup box. I don'ot know the format used by all of those companies, so I wouldn't know. I just go to the website and log on manually anyway, and if there's no way to do what the email told me I had to do, I email customer service and let them know that either there's a fraudulent email going around or their interface sucks ass.

bermuDa

8/10, the two i got wrong were apparently legitimate... call me paranoid ⌐_⌐

__________________
I am the very model of a moderator gentleman.

ratbastid

10 for 10.

I guess I'm glad to have scored that well on the quiz, but frankly, I'd rather err on the side of paranoia...

I apply the Common Sense rule. If Ebay were really validating the account information of EVERY ONE of their customers, I'd have read about it on slashdot or something. And they wouldn't use threatening language like "If you do not validate your account information, you leave us no choice but to cancel your account."

The thing I mostly look for in these emails is the destination URL of the links, which this quiz deliberately obliterated. A link to www.validate-ebay.com is NOT the same as www.validate.ebay.com.

k1ng

As a rule of thumb, if I receive an email like those in the quiz, I just log into the company's website (not using the link in the email) and sign in. If they are going to cancel my account or need more information from me, I'm sure they will ask for it after I log in.

__________________
"Delight in excellence is easily confused with snobbery by the ignorant." -Joseph Epstein

zenmaster10665

8/10 there are some damn good fakes out there though.

__________________
"Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.
He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way."
-Kurt Vonnegut

la petite moi

Wow, 30%. Scaryy- and I'm a geek.

CoachAlan

7/10. Though I must say that part of what I would use to determine legitimacy is where the links took me. Because these links were disabled, I couldn't use that additional means of bullshit detecting.

Still, It's a good learning experience, especially for those who are new to the internet or are dumb.

__________________
"If I cannot smoke cigars in heaven, I shall not go!"
- Mark Twain

JumpinJesus

I got 7/10. 2 of them I had correct to begin with, then changed them. Always go with first instinct.

Of course, I think everything is a scam. Maybe I'm too pessimistic.

__________________
"I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am" - Cormac McCarthy, All The Pretty Horses

spindles

9/10 - and the one I got wrong, I said was a fraud when it wasn't.

Bottom line, unless you are expecting something in your email, assume it is bad...

__________________
who hid my keyboard's PANIC button?

orphen

8/10. pretttay tricky. i didn't expect the earthlink one to be a fraud. and the ebay one to be legit... oh well

Cervantes

8 out of 10.. meh..

__________________
- "Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.."
- "Religions take everything that your DNA naturally wants to do to survive and pro-create and makes it wrong."
- "There is only one absolute truth and that is that there is only one absolute truth."

oberon

I got 7/10. However, I normally scan email headers & other metadata (URLs being linked to) before actually reading messages like these. That almost always identifies fraud for me. I would have gotten 10/10 no question if they provided the extra information for these messages.

And k1ng's method is another thing I normally do instead of following links in financially sensitive emails like these.

__________________
"There are finer fish in the sea than have ever been caught." -- Irish proverb

Realizm

10/10. Suppose that's due to my having to sort through phishy emails half the day. every day.

omega2K4

9/10

__________________
"While the State exists there can be no freedom. When there is freedom there will be no State." - Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form."- Karl Marx

TheShadow

Same score, same mistake. It seemed quite legit to me, but I guess I was wrong!

__________________
You know that song that goes like...

todd

I got a 5. I thought I'd done better

Jam

welll if they had posted the emails headers and message source it would be easier to identify

Bentley Little

Crap, I got 8 out of 10. I missed 2 and 5 (each were paypal ones, which I don't use). I am pissed. I privy myself as savvy to internet scams that I should have gotten a 10/10. Oh well. There goes my paypal account.

__________________
That is my 2 cents.

Cynthetiq

same here....

7/10 but I usually err on the side of caution thinking that they are ALL fake.

__________________
I don't care if you are black, white, purple, green, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, hippie, cop, bum, admin, user, English, Irish, French, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, indian, cowboy, tall, short, fat, skinny, emo, punk, mod, rocker, straight, gay, lesbian, jock, nerd, geek, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Independent, driver, pedestrian, or bicyclist, either you're an asshole or you're not.

sherpahigh

10/10

I'm so used to getting this shit in my email everyday I barely pay attention to most of it. Like some others have said if it's a real issue, logging into the actual site should clear it up.

I'll never follow a link from an email if it has to do with personal financial info.

__________________
"It'd be better for me if you don't understand"

cowudders14

Wow! I've really started a good discussion here. I must admit the one I got wrong was the earthlink - as they all went to the correct site, www.earthlink.net. I looked at the url as it appread in the browser, and that was what got me.

They have been very clever with that, the link uses the "uid:password@www.site.blah" - it has the earthlink pages in the part that the browser interprets as the username, followed by a huge long space, so the rest of the link falls off the right hand side of your screen. Then it has the rest, and the link is able to actually go anywhere without you seeing it until you click it. Course, I click links sometimes if I'm not sure, but I always make damn sure I look at the exact address I have arrived at. If anything takes me to a page that has a wrong address, or to something that turns your address display off, I close it. Hasn't failed me yet!