The term “phishing” is being used more and more frequently as people are being fooled by people posing as someone they are not.,

Phishing is a scam that is usually run through email or through sketchy web pages. The goal of these scams is to gain access to bank accounts or things like bitcoin.

This has become a major issue in workplace settings since email is one of the main forms of communication. These scams can disguise themselves in many ways, but one of the most common tricks is taking one of your coworkers’ email addresses and changing it slightly so when you click on the email you think it’s them.

“I started getting emails from my coworkers saying that I had emailed them asking for itunes giftcards. It turned out that the scammers had used a similar username to mine,” Kiki Gilderhus a dean at University of Northern Colorado said.

Phishing seems like it would mainly be a workplace issue, but it has started spreading and affecting teens. The average teenager has a school email or personal email. My experience with phishing happened through my school email. I had received an email with the password that I use on my personal accounts, claiming that they had hacked into my computer, gained access to my webcam, and had taken videos of me. They were threatening to send these videos to my contacts unless I paid them through bitcoin. When I saw this email, I freaked out and took it to my tech support at school. They looked at the email and determined that it was a phishing scam.

Phishing is a very scary thing to experience, but there are many ways you can keep your personal accounts from getting phished. One of the ways to prevent  phishing is by keeping accounts and passwords updated. Change your password every 90 days in order to keep accounts protected.

Another way to stop from being phished is by practicing how to recognize a scam email. Google has come out with a test that runs through popular phishing emails and teaches users what is a real email and what is a scam. It can be found here https://phishingquiz.withgoogle.com/

Getting phished can be stressful, but there are ways to avoid being scammed. If you get phished, the best option is to go to the tech department or ignore the email if it seems sketchy, and change your passwords.