E-Mail fraud attempts are con­stantly improving

Until a few years ago, awful Eng­lish and faulty rep­re­sen­ta­tion served to expose fraud­u­lent e-mails. Today, these look increas­ingly authentic. But you can expose them still.

Using spe­cific responses to e-mails actu­ally sent, crim­i­nals are cur­rently trying to tempt com­pany employees into opening infected file attach­ments. The par­tic­u­larly per­fid­ious thing: Such response mails seem to actu­ally orig­i­nate from the orig­inal addressee (source: www.cybercrimepolice.ch).

For a few years now, we have been expe­ri­encing an increasing pro­fes­sion­al­i­sa­tion of fraud attempts on the Internet gen­er­ally. Accord­ingly, phishing mes­sages received by e-mail, SMS or What­sApp look very authentic, making it hard to dis­tin­guish them from the real thing both visu­ally and con­tent-wise. And crim­i­nals are hardly deterred by any­thing nowa­days to deceive unsus­pecting consumers.

The good news: With the help of just a little prior knowl­edge, it is rel­a­tively easy to debunk just about all fraud attempts via e-mail, SMS or mes­senger ser­vice. Follow our rec­om­men­da­tions to pro­tect your­self and your device:

• Fraud­u­lent mes­sages usu­ally con­tain a dan­gerous link or an infected file attach­ment. If pos­sible, you should there­fore never use any link pro­vided in any e-mail, SMS or mes­senger noti­fi­ca­tion, but always enter the Internet address required (for instance that of your bank) man­u­ally into the address line of your browser.
• Don’t open any attach­ments you didn’t expect to receive, or if you are unable to verify the authen­ticity of a mes­sage received.
• Only use con­fi­den­tial infor­ma­tion, such as access data for your e-banking facility, for the intended pur­pose. Never pass them on to anyone else, not even (pur­ported) employees of your bank or a renowned com­pany such as Microsoft or Apple.
• Always apply a healthy dose of sus­pi­cion on the Internet. If a mes­sage, web­site or ser­vice looks strange to you, you should use a secure channel, for instance your tele­phone, to con­tact your bank or the respec­tive provider involved via the familiar direct dial number of your cus­tomer consultant.

Fur­ther infor­ma­tion and tips regarding fraud attempts can be found in our article on “Phishing“.