OPINION : Beware of ‘Yahoo Verification’ e-mail. It is a scam!

You wake up every day and every time you open your e-mail box there is a bold notice: YAHOO ACCOUNT VERIFICATION ALERT! asking you to verify your account name and password, age, and country. The e-mail, written with clear instructions and guidelines says you should fill in a form and that if you don’t respond in 24 hours; your e-mail account would be deleted for security reasons. This is because there is congestion on the Yahoo servers and that all unused Yahoo accounts would be shut down. You panic because you use your Yahoo account for business or academic purposes and thereafter because of the fear you submit your details including (most importantly) your password. A few minutes or days later you can no longer access your account. It has been blocked! All of a sudden all your contacts, the ones in your address book are receiving e-mails allegedly from your blocked address, either asking for money, or luring them into unfamiliar business dealings that you probably don’t know about. Doesn’t this sound like a familiar story? Have any of you or your colleagues had this experience? This story might sound like a narrative from a sci-fi movie. However, it is based on a true story and many are still getting familiar with it. The Yahoo Verification e-mail if anyone bothers to scrutinise it lacks validity in presentation and no one should pay much attention to it. This is a form of spam called spoofing or phishing (fishing). The author of verification e-mail want you to be scared enough to give them all your personal information, then they have your email account, your bank account, your credit cards…etc. The authors are highly well knowledgeable about how the internet works. Many of them are web programmers. They write small programmes (Internet robots) which they upload on the world wide wed (which we commonly know as the Internet.) These small programmes run through all Internet web-pages (with instructions) and picks up web addressed. In this case the small programme is written in a way that it is instructed to pick yahoo addresses. That is how your address is found. Yahoo would never ask you to email them your password. If it must, it would so from the company website itself, and there should not be a link in the verification email, but only instructions to put yahoo.com in your URL bar. So if you are not yet a victim of this YAHOO ACCOUNT VERIFICATION ALERT! E-mail and you receive it in future, it is a hoax. Just ignore it before you loose you account. keziodk@yahoo.com

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OPINION : Beware of ‘Yahoo Verification’ e-mail. It is a scam!