Phishing emails on the rise – what to do

My Amazon account has been “shut down for security reasons” four times last week. According to the poorly worded email…
It hasn’t.
I’ve received numerous links to lost airline tickets, packages, order errors and more. None of it is real. I’ve also experienced questionable items on my phone increasing in the last 30 days as well.
How can you stop this? You can’t. But, you can use good sense and coping skills on this one.
To Resolve this:
. Do not respond to anything you did not initiate no matter how tempting. Nothing. NO links, NO phone calls, NO popups. Nothing.
. Use a good credit card with good security on everything. I use American Express who removes unauthorized charges immediately.
. Clean up your phone and PC of unused Apps. It’s good practice to remove any apps from your phone that you do not use on a regular basis. Apps can be bought by other companies and the end user agreement changed without notice to something like “I can deliver ads to you all day, every day”. It’s happened to me. One minute I had a flash light app and the next I had an ad delivery app. Go to your settings for Apps and remove any you are not using or don’t recognize.
. Payloads delivered in email are becoming more common and much more sophisticated. DO not click links in emails you don’t expect. Sometimes, email threats come from people you know and trust. They may piggy back on other emails to gain your trust. Just don’t. The Qakbot which has been around for a long time but is currently morphing into something worse infects a device, and delivers a payload that scans it for email accounts and its login credentials. If it is successful, it will go through the inbox and send out replies to every available email (as opposed to just sending out a new email to all contacts). The reply will carry a quote of the original message, as well as a malicious payload in the attachment. People are less suspicious apparently for an email that looks ‘forwarded’ vs original. Don’t you be tricked, you herd it here first.