Category: information

How to Check a Financial Web Site is Genuine

Imagine you want to find the best place for your savings or the best place to invest a windfall or the best pension scheme available, for example.

You might go to a professional financial advisor or to your bank or other finance organisation you know.

But if you don’t have the money for an advisor then it might be a case of asking friends and relatives for their opinions or just using a search engine.

However, when you get to searching online, there is a huge number of finance organisations online and many criminals create fake websites that sometimes look exactly like the ones for genuine businesses.

Q. How do you tell which websites are genuine and which are fake?

The starting point is to ignore unsolicited emails, text messages, calls etc. – these are very likely to be fake and should be ignored.

Things to Look For

  1. Check the message and website looking for mistakes
    • Correct URL e.g. Barclays Bank rather than Baclays Bank
    • Use of broken English
    • Simple spelling mistakes or serious grammatical errors
    • The content on the website doesn’t make sense
    • Pictures, diagrams etc. that fit in with the rest of the site and haven’t just been added at random to fill space.

2. Open the Google Transparency Report webpage.

https://transparencyreport.google.com/safe-browsing/search?hl=en_GB

Click the “Search by URL” field in the middle of the page and type in the Internet address for the website you want to check. Google will tell you if it can find anything dodgy about the website.

  1. Check the company on the Companies House website at https://www.gov.uk/get-information-about-a-company
  2. Check for reviews online about the business and check anti-scam websites

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Increase in Scam Activity

All categories of scams have been increasing recently.

This may be due to better reporting but is also likely to be caused by increased scammer activity.

Category of Scam

2019 (first half)

% Increase
Impersonation £35 M 6%
Fake Bills £ 21 M 45%
Investments £43 M 108%
Invoices £56 m 7%
Fake Purchases £28 M 43%
Advance Fees £8 M 38%
Cheque Fraud £29 M 789%
Romance Scams £8 M 50%
Mobile Banking Fraud £5 M 33%
Telephone Banking Fraud £12 M 2%

 

Statistics are from UK Finance for the first half of 2019 compared to first hale of 2018.

If you have any experiences with scammers, spammers or time-wasters do let me know, by email.

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Raffle House Website Review

The website is https://rafflehouse.com/

It is literally about people raffling houses. This might seem a foolhardy thing to do but sometimes for whatever reason it may seem too difficult to sell a property the normal way and perhaps selling a great deal of raffle tickets can solve the problem. The winning ticket gives its owner the house and the sellers get the ticket money which may be more than the value of the property.

However, you can instantly see all sorts of problems with this idea – the most obvious one being that unless enough tickets are sold, the sellers are onto a loser.

There are fake house raffle websites but this one does seem to be genuine.

It is linked with Sterling Lotteries as running a raffle of this kind is really a form of gambling and Sterling Lotteries have the licences for that.

Their terms for the raffles state that If enough tickets are not sold by the end date then the end date may be moved so the raffle can continue.

If not enough tickets are sold when the raffle ends then the winner may get a cash prize which could be 75% of ticket sales minus costs.  There may be runner-up prizes as well.

It is not easy on the web site to discover how much the raffle company makes from the raffle process so if you intend to sell a house this way – do get all the relevant information before signing anything.

You will find other websites raffling houses, but most are one-offs created for just one sale.

If you choose to try this  – buy a ticket and you may be lucky but don’t go buying thousands of tickets expecting to win – that’s not how raffles work.

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The Clone Company Scam

The clone company scam is where scammers make use of a real company’s name and reputation and trade on that to convince victims that they are legitimate. The actual company generally knows nothing about this until they start to get complaints.

City Watchdog, the Financial Conduct Authority has increasingly been issuing warnings about this fraud (142 warnings in first half of 2019). Many of the companies involved are in the financial sector such as wealth managers, pension funds, mortgage companies, loan providers etc. but it can happen to any company.

Fraudsters may copy the company’s website, letter head etc. – anything to convince the victims for long enough to steal their money.

The big advantage for fraudsters in using someone else’s company name is that and potential victims checking online will find a reputable business.

If you are interested in any kind of investment or loan, do verify that the company is legitimate – check the FCA financial services register at  www.fca.org.uk/firms/financial-services-register or call their consumer helpline on 0800 111-6768

Never trust cold callers – anyone calling from a company you don’t already do business with, to offer any kind of investment or loan will likely be a scammer.

Never click on links in emails from people you don’t know.

Stay safe.

If you have any experiences with this scam do let me know, by email.

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The Price of Stolen Data

Hackers go to great lengths to get a copy of people’s confidential personal information – passport, driving licence, credit card details, bank details, logins and passwords etc. because these can be sold to scammers for a lot of money.

For example, typical values are below:-

  • Credit and debit card details of US citizens sell for $5 to $30 depending on the bank balance etc.
  • Credit and debit card details of UK citizens sell for $20 to $35
  • Bank login/password sells for $190 for a balance above $2,200
  • Bank login/password for UK bank accounts sell for $700 – $900
  • Login/password for Paypal sells for $20 – $300 depending on the balance
  • Login/password for Netflix sells for $0.55

(data is from a report by McAfee)

You can see how a hacker who can get access to this information for a lot of people can make a lot of money. Your confidential information is worth a lot to a hacker but a great deal more to you to keep it safe.

Do not publish anything confidential on social media or similar and do not give out such information to a caller unless you are sure who it is.

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Email Authentication Failure

You may receive emails that class themselves as being Spam.

Your Internet provider will have software analysing incoming emails and trying to weed out anything dangerous and mark anything that looks like unsolicited email from someone not in your contact list or white list as “Spam”.

Usually you have a range of options with your email from “block message from anyone you don’t know” (very safe option) through to “let everything through” (unsafe option).

You may also get a more interesting message on a spam email that says something such as “This email has failed authentication tests set by Walmart”.

Walmart is one of many large companies that use an extra layer of security for emails whereby they set up information on a public server and when emails claiming to be from Walmart arrive at your Internet provider they can automatically authenticate this against Walmart’s instructions (e.g. only a set IP address at Walmart is allowed to send out emails).

If the message fails, then it may be rejected but more likely to be classed as Spam and allowed through for the recipient to determine what action to take.

This extra layer of security is very useful but requires more work and is typically only used by large companies, banks etc. This is usually based upon the DMARC standard which is used by Google, Facebook, Apple, Craigslist, Virgin Media, British Airways, Dropbox, Amazon and many more.

Read the post at https://fightback.ninja/test/dmarc-email-authentication/ for more information on DMARC.

If you have any experiences with scammers, spammers or time-wasters do let me know, by email.

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