Phishing Websites
Getting you to visit a phishing website is the aim of a phishing email or message. Using this fake website the criminals will collect your personal information, especially user names, passwords and sometimes financial information such as credit card numbers.
The main method they use is really simple, they set up a webpage that looks exactly like the real one. You think it is real and fill in your log in information etc as you normally would but when you click submit the information is sent to the criminals rather than to the the real company.
It can be almost impossible to tell which site is real and which is fake just by looking a them. Try it on the two images below - which one is fake?
The fake one is the one with the name filled in, but there is no way you could tell looking at the two images. The only hint would be in the web address as shown in the next image, sometimes these differences are very subtle though.
If you think something is suspicious from an email or text either don't go on the site at all, or find the companies site a different way, eg via a search engine.
There are lots of phishing scams out there, you can find out more here https://www.phishing.org/ and on this Craig n Dave computer science video