Home > Guides > Protect Yourself From Fraudulent Emails

This is our guide to help educate our customers about fraudulent e-mails.

• What is Spoof
• Spoof E-mails And Sites
• Reporting Parcom Spoof or Phishing Activity
• How to Protect your Parcom account

What is Spoof?

A spoof or phishing (pronounced "fishing") e-mail is an e-mail that is designed to look like it comes from a well-known company.   In general they provide a legitimate sounding message to get you to click a link or button in the e-mail.

The links or buttons in the e-mail take you to a website that is also called a "spoof" because it, too, fakes the appearance of a popular website or company.   The spoof site asks you to input personal information, such as your credit card number, Social Security number or account password.   The site may be a domain that closely resembles the real company name as well.

You think you are giving information to a trusted company, when in fact, you are supplying it to a criminal.   This is a big problem in the world and unfortunately the criminals are getting away with it more and more.

Parcom wishes to provide this informative guide to all customers, even if you are not hosted with us as we truly believe it is in all our best interest to be educated about this very big problem.

If you receive a deceptive e-mail claiming it is from Parcom or is trying to deceive you into paying your hosting or domain registration in a questionable manner, please let us know immediately.

Spoof E-Mails and Sites

Many spoof e-mails look real.   Sometimes there are obvious signs that they are fake, other times it can be rather challenging to know if the message comes from the real company itself.  Typically e-mail is forged.   They may claim to come from the real company only to have created a fake header.  However, the e-mail header will tell a user if the message truly originated from the company.    Understanding an e-mail header can be challenging though.   So, the easiest thing to look at are the URLs sent in the message.  If you move your cursor over the URL, does it go to the company or to some IP address?    A lot of times the URL is to some IP or similar domain.  If it does not look right, don't click it!    A good example is that the Parcom billing messages and statements we send to you will always include URLs that are based on parcom.net.   Variations will include places like secure.parcom.net, but essentially the primary domain is still the same.    Same for other companies.   When in doubt, do not hesitate to ask us.

What to do about Parcom Spoof or Parcom Phishing Activity

Remember, at Parcom we will never you ask for your personal information via e-mail.  This includes:

Credit Card Numbers
Social Security Numbers
Checking Account Numbers
Driver's License Numbers

In general, you will not get attachments from Parcom.  Attachments can have viruses, and we want to stress that Parcom never sends attachments from our billing systems for you to review.

If you suspect a Parcom customer is doing spoof or is running a phishing site please immediately report it to abuse@parcom.net

If you are in doubt about a Parcom message please do the following:

1. Forward the message to support@parcom.net
2. Don't alter the subject line or forward the message as an attachment—doing so prevents us from investigating it further.
3. Once you have forwarded the e-mail, you can then delete it from your e-mail account.

If you have a spoof message from a company other than Parcom, we highly suggest you report it to the other company directly. 

How to Protect your Parcom account

Parcom works hard to educate customers about spoof e-mails.  However, we do offer a great solution to reduce such e-mails from your account.   We offer our very popular anti-spam service.   Please consider it as a must have for your Parcom hosted account.   We work hard to block reported spoof messages as well as common spoofed Parcom messages via this system.

Steps to take to prevent spoof from affecting you:

1. Keep your security software current. Update your firewalls and security patches for your operating system frequently.
2. Maintain an up to date anti-virus software solution on your machine.
3. Change your password often.  If you think your security may have been breached, create a new password immediately.  This is true for e-mail, FTP, FrontPage, and even your control panel.
4. Use a unique password. Your Parcom password(s) should be one-of-a-kind, and not used on any of your other accounts at other services.  A good, strong password contains letters and numbers and includes upper and lower case characters at the same time.  We also recommend throwing in an FF in the password as that represents a NULL character in computing and that can be harder for a hacker to see!  All of this makes it more difficult for people to guess it.
    

You can never be too careful about spoof and phishing e-mail.  We suggest that each Parcom customer NEVER click on a link in a suspicious e-mail but instead, open a new browser window and type-in the URL to get to the sites referred to in the e-mail.  Again, as mentioned above, if you move your cursor and hover above the link, the URL should point to the same legitimate place.  If it does not, it would be safe to disregard and delete the e-mail immediately.