15/09/2018
There are so many new alerts coming out from the Police and anti-fraud agencies at the moment, including ones about fake phone calls from banks leading to a bank employee visiting the victims hope to swap their old debit card for a new one (and collecting the PIN number at the same time). I may well share more of them here, to to try and raise awareness of the fraud risks.
There are a few things you can do to try and check the trustworthiness of emails, but the most important is to remain suspicious. Just a few tips:
Have a look at the email address, which may well look genuine. However, if you hover over it with your mouse or click on it you should be able to see the actual email address the message originated from. It is possible to 'mask' an address, so whilst it looks like it came from (for example) security@paypal.com, if you actually check the email address there may be a long stream of random numbers and / or letters ahead of a domain name that isn't PayPal.com (or whatever business the phishing email is purporting to be from). Legitimate companies always send emails through a server based out of their company website (such as support@microsoft.com). If you see a long string of numbers / letters in front of the @ sign or the name of a free email service before the .com (or any other domain), you need to question the legitimacy of the email in question.
"Dear customer"... legitimate emails from the companies you do business with will almost certainly address you by name.
Emails with poor spelling or poor grammar are a bot of a give away, although (of course) this does require you to be good enough at spelling and grammar to sport the errors.
Emails warning you of a security issue with your account and suggesting it has been blocked should immediately arouse your suspicion. This would especially be the case if the email offers a link for you to follow to reset things, rather than asking you to independently open your browser and manually enter the web address.
Emails confirming you are entitled to a tax refund - HMRC tend to send paper letters, even if your mode of communication with them is electronic.
Emails suggesting you have a voucher waiting from a supermarket or other vendor; just click here to claim.
This list isn't exhaustive, it's just a few possible things that should alert your 'suspicion antenna'. The most important thing is to remain suspicious when it comes to emails, unexpected phone calls and 'to good to be true' Facebook posts.
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