It's unfortunate but true. Most of these online scams are known now as "phishing" scams and are typically known for masquerading as well know banks and credit card processors. The goal is to steal your information and use it for nefarious purposes such as stealing your identity, emptying your bank account, scamming others and even stealing email addresses.

Even child safety experts and their line of work get side tracked by this. It seems as though no one is immune today. There are some scurrilous individuals around that play the "missing child" alert to scrape and steal email addresses for their spamming purposes.

One of the latest phishing scams is an Amber Alert. Masquerading as the well known and highly effective alert system to find and save abducted children, this latest is particularly loathsome. The alert mentioned a 13 year old girl missing in Ohio. It was sent via an email chain with innumerable addresses on it.

You do not need to be a helpless victim of this or any other phishing scam online. Here are some great tips as to real versus fake. You can learn to know the difference. You can understand what is a phishing scam and what is not in order to keep yourself, your children and your families safer online.

First, stay calm. "Oh No! Another child missing! Let's help!" is a natural reaction. The point is, it's a reaction. Make your first rule about any unsolicited email, no matter who it is from, to hold a very healthy skepticism about it. Take time to read further. If you did not request it or it seems to elicit panic or a harsh emotion such as, "Your account is suspended!" chances are it's a scam.

Two, true and valid Amber Alerts do not come as singular emails forwarded on from individual to individual. The "chain email" or even funny-looking links to follow are not indicative of real businesses contacting you.

Third, check to see if the email address is valid or a dead link.

As a rule, whenever you get questionable stuff like this type of email, go to Google. Simply enter it in the Google search box and add the word urbanlegend. Or, you can go to snopes (dot) com.

With these two tools you can find out very quickly whether it is real or not. The second thing that people are not aware of is that often these emails are used to gather email addresses for email spamming. If you scroll down you can see everyone who every got this line. When you get those ads for breast enlargement etc, you know where it came from!