There are numerous ways fraudsters trick users into sharing confidential and sensitive information. Today, it's often done by social engineering, whereby malicious individuals use psychological manipulation tricking users into performing certain actions that reveal the desired information.

While the original phrase was coined years ago to describe this technique to fraudulently obtain confidential information was referred to as "phishing", there are now several additional methods malicious actors use including SMiShing, Vishing, and Pharming.

Regardless of the method used, the end goal for most all these fraudulent activities are to steal or compromise confidential, personal, and sensitive information for malicious, nefarious purposes.

First it's important to examine each type of fraud, how it's implemented, and then discuss methods to protect oneself and others:

Phishing

Phishing is normally an attempt to trick a user into divulging personal and confidential information such as a social security number, credit card information, social media profile, or banking login credentials.

Phishing via email scams has been around for years. However, now that there are . . .