How to identify Phishing Email Phishing is a masked attack through email that inveigles users into believing they are receiving the mail from a genuine party and leads them on to parting with sensitive information such as user names and passwords of bank accounts or credit card details. Unless you know and can distinguish between genuine and fake or phishing email, you may end up disclosing such details to people who may misuse and exploit the information. There are several pointers to identify such phishing mails. Similar looking or sounding domain names are one of the simplest ways to spoof users into believing they are receiving the mail from a genuine party. For instance you may receive an email purportedly from Virginair but a giveaway is that the email address may be something like virginair@yahoo.com . Big companies always have domain linked email addresses. Spelling mistakes are common in phishing attacks. For instance, the domain name may appear as Facbook.com