Apple Password Reset Scam

gtmtnbiker said:

You should be able to do a mouse over on the link to see what the Url is without going to the site. If it's not Apple.com, then it's bogus.

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Always type in a URL or go to the bookmarked site directly if you're going to enter a password or other sensitive data. Never click a link in an untrusted email and type in a password. Hovering over the link and looking at it is insufficient because there are international characters that look nearly identical to English/Roman characters:

аpple.com
apple.com

One of those begins with an English "a" and is the Apple computers web site. The other begins with a Cyrillic "а" and could be to a Russian credit card scammer's site. It's a more sophisticated version of linking to appIe.com (with a capital I instead of a lower-case l) and hoping that those characters look the same in the target's font or that they don't look too closely.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack

gtmtnbiker said:

Thanks for sharing this. I knew about the english version but didn't know about the Cyrillic approach. Very clever.

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Most browsers attempt to protect against that sort of thing but the techniques are variable and often leave some of those avenues still open.

So the safest thing is to always manually enter the bank's URL in the browser (or use a bookmark) and never click on it in an email.