Beware of fakes!

Web­sites, apps, texts – any­thing dig­ital is rel­a­tively easy to fake. Crim­i­nals are increas­ingly taking advan­tage of this fact to scam unsus­pecting users.

The National Cyber Secu­rity Centre (NCSC) warns: There is cur­rently a web­site con­fus­ingly sim­ilar to the offi­cial AHV site. This page is adver­tising a pur­ported pen­sion reform, com­plete with an invented quote by National Coun­cillor Mag­dalena Mar­tullo-Blocher. To gain vis­i­tors’ trust, there is also a cor­re­sponding state­ment signed by all the Fed­eral Coun­cil­lors (source: PCtipp).

If you fall for this and enter your credit card details, you will have to part with high sums of money. Those fraud­sters behind this copy of the AHV page are after their vic­tims’ sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion and ulti­mately their money.

There is an increasing number of faked dig­ital plat­forms or news. Experts esti­mate there is a dig­ital double for every second web­site already. Even expe­ri­enced users find it increas­ingly dif­fi­cult to tell orig­i­nals from fakes.

This is what you can do: Never use any links you receive by e-mail, text or mes­senger ser­vices, and never scan in any such QR codes to log into any web­site, in par­tic­ular your finan­cial insti­tu­tion facility. Instead, always enter the address of your online ser­vice provider or finan­cial insti­tu­tion into your browser address line man­u­ally. You can read up on how to estab­lish that you are on the cor­rect web­site here.