Identifying fraudulent emails

Fraudsters will often impersonate reputable companies to entice people into revealing their personal information in an effort to hijack an account. This is referred to as phishing and is quite common on the internet. 

Emails sent by Hover

Hover will never send unsolicited emails requesting your personal information such as:

  • Birthdate
  • Mother's maiden name
  • Social Security Number
  • Password

If you contact Hover for assistance, we may need to verify you as the account holder by confirming the personal details in your Hover account.

We will never initiate the first contact with an account holder requesting their personal information which has already been provided within the account.

How to identify fraudulent emails

Here are some red flags you should take into consideration when trying to determine whether an email is legitimate or not.

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  1. Check the "Return-To" address in the email headers to see where the email is being sent from. In an effort to impersonate a reputable company, fraudsters will send emails from a similar or mistyped domain. 
  2. The email is not addressed to you personally. Legitimate companies will usually address the name of the account holder and will not use terminology like "Dear Webmail User" or "Dear Email Account Owner."
  3. The company name is not clearly stated within the email. Fraudsters will often send generic email templates to users on various platforms using obscure senders like "Administrator" or "Helpdesk."
  4. You are being asked for your personal information through an unsolicited email, phone call, or letter. If you have not contacted us for support, we will not get in touch with you to provide assistance.
  5. The language in the email instills urgency or panic. It's common for phishing emails to claim the account has been compromised or something similar and will request your login details.

What to do if you've received a fraudulent email

If you've received fraudulent or phishing emails, please mark them as spam. This will allow your email spam filter to learn which types of emails to consider spam and block future emails in a similar fashion. 

You should never respond to or click on any links within a suspicious or fraudulent-looking email. 

To report fraud or a phishing email, you can submit a report on the consumer fraud reporting webpage. Reporting the email will not prevent or block future emails, the best course of action to block future fraudulent emails is to mark them as spam.

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Manually marking an email as spam

Marking an email as spam reports various elements of the email like the sender, email headers, email contents, etc. to the email server. The spam filter will incorporate these elements and filter out future emails that are similar.

Reporting legitimate marketing emails as spam will be ineffective since they are considered a trusted sender. Unsubscribing from their mailing list will prevent future marketing emails.

Note: Marking an email as not spam will teach the spam filter which kinds of emails are considered safe.

  1. Mark the email as Spam.
    Hosted_email_mark_spam_email.png
  2. Press Accept to confirm the selected email as spam.
    Important: If you confirm to share your data with our Spam partner, the pop-up will go away and you will not be prompted to make a selection going forward. Should you choose to decline, when you mark an email as Spam, the pop-up will appear each time.
    hosted_email_spam_consent.png

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