I recently published the following article on my own website (www.amherst-partners.com) and thought I should also publish it here.

Every year around the holidays as both brick & mortar and online sales increase so does the occurrence of various online scams. I've probably received at least 2 dozen scam email messages over the past few weeks informing me about my winning free items of all sorts - all I have to do is "click here" to receive my prize. Have you ever heard the saying - if it sounds too good to be true it usually is? Well this is most certainly the case here - DON'T click on any of those links - 99.9% of the time they are scams.

You may also receive an email from your bank, credit card company, PayPal, Google, etc. informing you that there is an issue with your account. These messages usually contain a link that they tell you to click on to access your account to "fix" the problem. These messages look amazingly legitimate and contain language usually copied directly off the company's site that they claim to be. Even the logos of the legitimate company will usually be included in the message - anything to make it look as legitimate as possible. DON'T ever click on one of these links. They will take you to a website and page that looks a lot like your Banks or PayPal or some other legitimate looking site. However, when you "login" to your account all you are doing is giving the scammers your real account username and password to the real site. From there they have access to your account and can do with it as they please.

Now, you may be thinking, what if I receive a legitimate email from my bank or credit card company - what should I do? First - DON'T click on any links in any email message from one of your financial institutions - EVER! If you receive an email from your bank or credit card company that you believe is legitimate use your own saved link to that institution and login there. Or, better yet, visit the official website for that institution, look for their customer support phone number and call them directly.

And remember this, legitimate businesses will never send you an email message asking you to click a link to login to "your" account online to fix a problem.

I forgot to mention this. If you are lucky enough to receive a huge inheritance or win a foreign lottery from a country you never visited and may not have heard of please, please DELETE the email immediately. If you get one of these it will likely be from some friendly person in Nigeria claiming to be some lawyer or government official that tracked you down somehow and now all you need to do is contact him to arrange to receive your money. The catch is that it will require you to invest a "small sum" to process your claim. Scam, Scam, Scam....

You've been warned...