Most scams involve things that the institutions themselves would never do, such as calling you on the telephone or sending as email to have you update your confidential finanical information. The email scams are fundamntally no different from telephone scams or door-to-door confidence scams, where the "bank" (imposter) calls you and asks you for confidential information. The real institution already has this information, and they don't need it again. The question of how to verify the Website is the wrong question to ask. Assume you can't verify it, and instead get the website address, phone number, etc from your genuine bank statement. If you get something unusual or confusing, print it out and take it to your financial institution. --Dean On Sun, 21 Dec 2003, Mark Smith wrote: > And don't trust emails asking for sensitive information. Verify their > requests independantly via the phone, for example, and just _don't_ use > a phone number that is supplied in the email.