Phishing attacks are common. A scammer sends you an email claiming to be from your bank, Paypal, Amazon, eBay, your email company, whatever. The link takes you to a legitimate-seeming login in page, you enter your username and password unwittingly, the page does nothing, and the scammer now has your login. Usually, they’re quite cleverly written, albeit more commonly they’re full of tell-tale grammatical and spelling errors.

But, I just received a phish to the inbox of my Google Mail account that simply said: “Dear Gmail customer. Click the link below to unlock your account” and gave a link that I was supposed to click. Obviously, I didn’t. If anyone is really stupid enough to click a link in an email in an account that is so obviously not “locked”, then, I’m sorry, but they probably deserve all they get they have made a serious error of email judgement.

The take-home message, however, is that you should never click any link in an email, you should also make sure your browser is running some kind of phishing protection just in case you inadvertently do in a moment of lost concentration. Sciencetext has covered the warning signs for phish several times before. But, today’s scammer has to be the bolshiest and stupidest to think that the minimalist approach would work…although that said, given the number of people scammed by phish on Facebook, maybe it would.