You have received an email from a person with whom you have never interacted earlier and claiming that you have won some prize or amount in a lucky draw or maybe you’ve received an email that looks quite interesting. How do you do this without directly asking the other person? Before you can trust the sender via email and before sending your reply, it’s important that you properly identify the person who is associated with this email.
There are usually two methods that may be used to confirm the identity of a person associated to an email address. You can either use the sender’s email address or use the IP address of that email address to point out the possible location where it originated from. In this post, we’ll go over some methods based on tips and tricks to reveal the possible person behind the email address which have sent you an email.
Googling
Searching on Google as the first step. Copy the email address of sender and paste it in the Google search bar. If it is a scam or fraud, then there is a strong chance that you will find some information about it. If you don’t find any information on Google about the sender email and it appears to be a legitimate one, proceed with the tips mentioned ahead for the confirmation.
Indications of legitimacy: If you’re questioning the legitimacy of a particular email, here are some things to look out for that may indicate whether it’s real or fake:
The email address of the sender doesn’t match the website address of an organization through which he/she is claiming an offer.
The email is sent from a free web mail address.
Your name isn’t properly used in the email.
The email contains a sense of urgency regarding your reply or response.
The email contains a website link and you are asked to click on it. This link may be forged or may appear similar to the proper address (a minor spelling mistake makes it different altogether) of some legitimate web site and asks you to enter your personal information such as username, passwords, etc. These points will help you to make an educated guess that whether the sender is a real person or a fake person pretending to be real.
Read Also Phishing and it's defenses
Facebooking
To Confirm the Identity of A Person. According to Wikipedia Currently, Facebook has approximately 1.3 billion active users and an email address is required to become a registered Facebook user. So, there is a strong chance that you may find the owner of email address through Facebook. Simply, copy and paste the email address of the sender into the Facebook search bar and hit the search button. It will show you the profile associated with that email address. There is also a chance that you’ll get nothing in the search results.There are many fake Facebook profiles and you have to keep this in mind too. Scrolling through the timeline of a particular profile can help you figure out with ease whether the profile is real or fake.
Locate Email IP Address
An email does not only contain the information in the content but there’s also useful information that is not visible at first glance. This information contains the IP address of the sender as well. You can use this IP address to determine the country and city of the sender to get a better idea of sender's location.
To extract the IP address, open up the email header by clicking on the ‘Reply’ button and then click on ‘Show Original’ Once the email header is accessed then locate Received: From and you will find the IP address nearby it. Copy the IP address and paste it in IP address search bar of IP Location such as IP Location Finder-Geolocation to find the origin of the email.
Searching on all Famous Social Media Sites
Apart from Facebook, there are many other social media websites as well and you should check the email ID on all of them if you’re suspicious. If you start doing this task one by one on every social media website, then it will take a lot of time to go through all.
Search on Internet Directory
You can even use internet directories to search for people based on their emails. Pipl is one such free service that lets you reverse search for people based on their email addresses, phone numbers and names.
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