I bet you've received a note from your bank that starts something like this message I just got: "Dear valued TCF Bank member, due to concerns for the safety and integrity of the online banking community, we have issued the following warning message...

The message continues: "It has come to our attention that your account information needs to be confirmed due to ... " and there's a nice easy-to-click link saying "To confirm your bank account records, please [click here]".

This is a bogus message sent by online criminals. Click on the link and you'll go to a Web page that looks exactly like the real TCF Bank Web site, but the truth is in the Web site address. Rather than "tcfbank.com" or similar, it's "https://secure.mvnt4.com/". Many of these scam messages just go to sites referenced by number, with no domain name at all.

Since these criminals are "fishing" for account information (imagine the consequences of blindly entering your actual account and password information to their system!) these sort of scams that masquerade as real email from legitimate companies is now known as "phishing".

Some of these phishing messages are quite ingenious: I've received a wave of messages that appear to be a communication from a buyer on eBay who is just notifying me that they've paid me for an item they won on auction. The purpose of the message is for me to click the "reply" button, log in to "ebay" (it's not eBay, of course, it's the scam Web site collecting account information) and then doubtless get an error message to keep me from being too suspicious.

Here's how you can avoid being caught by these phishing messages: never click on a link that takes you to a site that requires you to log in. If you were to get a legit message from Paypal, eBay, Wells Fargo, Citibank, TCF, whomever, simply go to your Web browser and type in the address of the company Web site. Then log in as normal and check to see if there are any messages or other indications that there really is a problem.

I'll bet that there isn't anything wrong at all. After all, given how many of these annoying phishing messages are sent now, do you really think that these companies are going to send real messages and confuse their customers?

It's the holidays and people are spending more money on credit. Phishing messages are increasing. Be careful out there!