Don't reply, phishing
Olympia resident Vern Seguin, 85, didn’t know what to think when he received a suspicious e-mail a month ago that included a Chase Bank logo matching the one on his credit card. The e-mail asked Seguin to reply by sending his credit card number into cyberspace.
“For a couple of seconds, I said, well, OK,” said Seguin, giving the message a temporary benefit of the doubt. “Then, I thought, wait a minute.”
Rather than reply, he called his bank.
By doing that, Seguin avoided becoming a victim of “phishing,” a type of identity theft that uses fraudulent e-mail to duplicate the logo or Web site of a well-known company and then redirect the recipient to a bogus Web site to update personal information.