Online Wish List Dangers

Christmas is a time when some people make wish lists online and these can be fun but they can inadvertently give away a lot of information to scammers.

Amazon maintains wish lists so in theory other people can buy gifts for you that you do want rather than having to figure out what you might want. Amazon has three levels of privacy – Public, Shared or Private.  Choosing Public lets anyone see the list, Private means just you and shared is where you can choose who gets to see the list.

Allowing this information to be public should be harmless, but people who are trying to steal your identity can use this information to get critical details about you.

Michelle Black works with Hope 4 USA in Ft. Mill. She spends several hours a day helping people recover from ID theft, which is one of the fastest growing crimes.

Black says “A scammer can log into these public websites, public wish lists. From there they might have such information as your city and state, your date of birth, your children’s names and perhaps their dates of birth and they can use that to start putting together the pieces of the puzzle they need to fully steal your identity.”

The thieves then create a fake website by making it look like Amazon or the online wish list company.

They  tell you someone has purchased an item on your list and all you have to do is login to confirm the mailing address.

And if you click on that link and login, the scammer has the information needed to access your account and maybe even for identity theft.

Make sure any online wish list or gift registry is set to Private.

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The Impact of Phishing Scams

Phishing scams are where the scammer sends you an email or a text or calls you, claiming to be from the government, the local council, the phone company or your Internet provider, a major retailer etc.  aiming to get your confidential information such as login and password details or credit card details etc.

These scams are extremely common with many people receiving numerous such emails or messages each day. Some organisations get hundreds of these scam messages every day and the Internet providers block billions of these messages every day.

For organisations, blocking these messages takes time and resources, but if the criminals get the data they seek, the damage can be long lasting.

A survey of large organisations suggested the cost of such activity averages around $2 million for a 10,000 person company and is attributed as follows:-

  • Business impact through loss of proprietary information (41%)
  • Loss of productivity (35%)
  • Other wider effects (16%)
  • Damage to reputation (8%)

Prevention is generally easier and cheaper than disaster recovery activities so make sure your organisation has the right systems protection in place and train staff on how to recognise phishing threats.

If you have any experiences with these scams do let me know, by email.

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Covid-19 Passport Scam

This is a new Covid scam.

The email title calls the message an “Official Notification – NHS COVID-Pass – GOV.CO.UK | COVID_19 Vaccination-Passport | Your GOVnhsoffice.co.uk order of “UK CVD19”

It offers the recipient the opportunity to get a Covid-19 passport which really means a certificate to prove the recipient is vaccinated against Covid-19 and is currently Covid-19 negative.

The government do not send out such emails and private companies are not allowed to offer this.

Most of the message is text copied from various websites about how this is needed to open up travel again.

There is a big green ACCEPT button and a big red REJECT button.

Both of which go to the same link which is at a Japanese domain name that is nothing to do with the UK government.

Scammers often target major problems in the world and have no interest in helping anyone but themselves.

Delete any such messages.

If you have any experiences with these scams do let me know, by email.

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Stupidest Spam of the Week Fat Burning Coffee

There are endless magic ingredients offered by scammers that supposedly create weight loss – normally without any effort or exercise or even restricting your diet.

Clearly these are all lies, invented by scammers to get your money and/or personal details.

This latest one has the title ‘The death of black coffee’.

It involves a ‘weird trick’ which is common for many of these scams.

It claims that one tiny tweak to your morning coffee puts your body into fat burning mode all day and it takes less than ten seconds.

There are nice photos of hot coffee drinks.

So, this trick is supposed to ‘ignite your metabolism’. No doctor or responsible person would describe a real product using that phrase. Anything that did ‘ignite your metabolism’ would be extremely dangerous as it would mean pushing your body temperature up significantly.

There is a link to click to get the ten second trick.

Never never click on such links in unsolicited emails as it encourages these criminals and you can only lose.

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Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit

Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit (DCU) is an international team of technical, legal and business experts that has been fighting cybercrime to protect victims since 2008.

They use their expertise with online criminal networks to uncover evidence to pass onto the appropriate law enforcement agencies throughout the world. They can also disrupt the operational infrastructure used by cybercriminals, through civil legal actions and sometimes by technical means.

DCU has developed strong relationships with local and global law enforcement, security firms, researchers, NGOs and customers to drive scale and fight cybercrime. They also use the evidence they collect to help with the development of technical countermeasures to strengthen the security and safety of Microsoft’s products and services.

Areas of Focus

  1. Tech Support Fraud. These scams are very common as the criminals involved operate this scam on an industrial scale. DCU use data analytics and direct customer complaints to investigate criminal networks engaged in tech support fraud.
  2. Business Email Compromise (BEC). This is where criminals impersonate key people in an organisation e.g. the Finance Director to get an employee to transfer funds to the criminals. BEC is one of the most prolific and costly cybercrime attacks in the world today. According to a 2020 FBI report, BEC attacks were responsible for $1.8B in losses and represent more than 40% of all cybercrime losses.
  3. In 2020, the DCU secured court orders to block malicious web applications targeting business organizations, directed the removal of 744,980 phishing URLs resulting in the closure of 3,546 malicious email accounts used to collect stolen customer credentials obtained through successful phishing attacks.
  4. This is a wide area of criminal activity and DCU focus on identifying and disrupting these criminal activities.
  5. DCU focus on payment systems and disruption of the criminal infrastructure behind these attacks.
  6. Business Operations Integrity. This means supply chains and all systems infrastructure that can be attacked by criminals.

Keep up the good work DCU.

If you have any experiences with these scams do let me know, by email.

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