With phishing scams becoming ever more popular among scammers, they are becoming harder and harder to spot. Often using the company logo and an extremely similar email address to the company's legitimate email, it can be extremely difficult to distinguish whether these emails are the genuine article or not.
Companies across the board are often used in these phishing email and SMS scams. We have all received an email or text message pertaining to be from one of the big names such as Amazon, eBay or PayPal telling us of some sort of problem with our accounts and how we must log in via the link they have ever so handily provided within the email. Whilst some scams are easy to spot, they are now becoming ever more elaborate and common and sadly those most vulnerable are falling victim to them.
With companies creating dedicated hotlines and email addresses for consumers to report phishing scams made in their names, it would seem people are becoming more aware of the lengths people will go to in order to get our personal details. Unfortunately some companies often handle hundreds of complaints a week dealing with a scam made in their name that has nothing to do with them.
Many consumers believe the elaborate phishing scams that arrive in their email or SMS inbox and make contact with the scammers, believing them to be the company in question. They then hand over their personal details to the scammers. These unsolicited emails and text messages can be sent to anyone - recent phishing scam emails for certain companies have landed in both the CEO’s email inbox and that of a person in parliament. Rather than clicking the link within the emails or text messages, consumers should endeavour to visit the website themselves and log in to see if there are any problems. Most companies would not alert consumers to a problem and ask them to log in via a certain link, they would advise for consumers to visit themselves to minimise their customers falling for these scams.
Plenty of companies find their names are being used in these elaborate scams and a recent example is Wonga SA - they even launched a fraud hotline to warn against the widespread scam that their name was being used as a front for. With some consumers out of pocket and an average 300 complaints a week, Wonga SA contacted the police at the outset and recently escalated it to the Hawks for further investigation and prosecution. Victims of the scam can report to the fraud hotline here.
Scammers do not discriminate in who they target and it is often the most vulnerable who fall for these scams. The companies who are being used as a front then have to field the complaints and take steps to rectify a horrendous situation. With Wonga SA taking steps as a responsible business to alert consumers to this scam, hopefully more companies can take the lead and consumers can become better educated about these scams.
