Added on: 26/09/2024
UK’s Payment System Regulator is working to introduce a new mandatory reimbursement scheme on 7th October 2024, which will help consumers get their money back (£85.000 instead of the initial £415.000 proposed) from the banks if they fall victims to scams and fraud.
As with any news worthy information, scammers are on top of this, and are now targeting consumers with elaborate and well crafted phishing emails and cloned websites.
Which? has issued a public alert about this new phishing related to the new fraud reimbursement scheme.
According to Which?, scammers target consumers with well designed phishing emails (including bank’s brand identity), inviting people to confirm their mobile number in order to get notified of any transactions carried out of their accounts.
Once people access the link, they are redirected to a clone of the bank’s real website. This is done in order for people to lower their guard and reveal as much information as possible to the scammers.
The scam comes from a different domain than the original one, and based on Which?’s findings, the email came from “dilbect@kolumbus.fi”. This is a positive aspect, as it makes it easier for us to make the distinction once we dig a bit deeper.
Since legitimate domains are very difficult to spoof (if they have the security measures in place), 99% of the time, scammers will use their own domains for these attacks. In this case, Permission-Based Emailing (aka Whitelisting) will keep you safe.
Permission-Based Emailing enables you to select the senders you need and trust, which will keep their emails in your inbox, while everything else will get deleted.
If you want to set this up for your email, I wrote an article that goes through the whole process step-by-step. In case you’re looking for a quicker and easier way of setting it up, you can try Sentrya (for free for 14 days).
With Sentrya, you can:
- Find which companies have and process your information
- Build, update and manage your Email Permissions (Whitelist)
- See the spam and scams discovered in your inbox
-Delete your data from the web and from data brokers, and much more
I hope this brings some clarity into this new type of phishing email, and will make it easier for you to protect against them.
Stay safe❤️