Be safe...be overly cautious online
Got an email from your bank? An email telling you your order is on the way? Be carefull. Be VERY careful. Unless you are absolutely sure of who is sending you this stuff, err on the side of caution. I recently put up a camera for auction on craigslist. Someone wanted to buy it...but wanted me to send it to her "daughter" Ding! Ding! Ding! alarms in my head went off. I played along for a while and the person eventually sent me a very real looking paypal receipt saying she had sent my money. Gee..for some reason the money never showed up in my account. See THIS ARTICLE. Scumbags are getting smarter (well, some of them are). I ordered something from Walmart...a couple of days later there was an email about my Walmart shipment. Heck, almost every week I get an email aboug a Walmart shipment whether or not I ordered anything from them. Scams everywhere you look....so please be extra careful and like I said, err on the side of caution because if you don't answer an email, nothing bad is going to happen even if it's a legitimate one. I get email from credit card companies I've never had accounts with, but unfortunately, some I have had accounts with so they can look legitimate. Anyway, that's my $0.02
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It is the latest craze to "pay" you to ship something somewhere, but the payment is fake, and the address where the item went is an abandoned house, or in a country where our law enforcement has no reach.
Do you ever see the "lock" icon in your browser, indicating you're on a secured site? Up until a couple of months ago, this secured lock could be trusted, and you could click on it to verify the website you were working with. Not anymore. Unless your computer is completely up-to-date, you can't trust them anymore. A vulnerability was found, and has been exploited, so fake sites can present a signed certificate and appear to be the real-deal, security and all. Unless you have the latest updates, your browser will check the certificate and accept it as authentic, never even warning you that there could be a problem with it. The fake site would look like the real deal.
There may be other vulnerabilities on these certificates that haven't yet been discovered. For that reason, I recommend that from now on, never trust any links in any email. If you're doing something financial or providing personal information, make sure you're going to the known website for the entity you're dealing with. If you're not sure, Google it - Google does some proactive work to filter out a lot of the phishing sites. It's not perfect, but it's better than trusting an email link.