It is fairly easy to spot a fake email, others are written to play on peoples fear of authority or cancellation threats.

Quite allot of new spam emails are sent with and HTML page so that when the victim opens the page there is no suspicious URL as the file is local. The page then posts the page data to the attackers URL.

This also makes detecting and reporting the emails slightly harder as post URL is usually obfuscated.

The post URL can be easily found with FireFox addon TamperData

First open the spam message or webpage you wish to find the post page for .

The email I received is a Hotmail  account phishing  email.

Second make sure all other tabs are closed. Then start TamperData (Tools –> Tamper Data –> Start Tamper).Input some fake data and submit.

 

You can now see the exact place where the data is being posted.

Sometimes spammers have many different spam sites and one central place to collect the accounts so to make sure you should report the right URL so the phisher can be stopped.

Next step is to report the URL to Google. HERE

Next report to Microsoft. This has to be done from within IE 8/7. Visit the URL.

Then Settings –> Safety –>  Report Unsafe Website

Then do a who.is lookup to see who is hosting the domain so that they can be informed of the abuse.

In the example the domain is iserver.net.  This is hosted by an Australian company. I then reported the phishing url page thelaun9.iserver.net/mys/index.php & where all the stolen data is to prove it is being used for phishing thelaun9.iserver.net/mys/conf.php.

If more people report phishing emails it will help make the web a safer place.

Update : Site is now blocked  in Firefox / Chrome after I reported it.