How can you know if your child is at risk?
As we mentioned previously, the scammers can pretend to be legitimate companies, using e-mails which simulate cloned companies to ask for personal information and that the victims include this personal information on these malicious websites.
Identity theft sites look like legitimate site as they tend to use the copyrighted images of the real sites. However, the requests for confidential information via e-mail or instant messaging are generally not legitimate. As a general rule, fraudulent messages are not personalised, they usually have many similar factors such as headers or footers. It is important to consider that any e-mail which asks for banking information is probably an identity theft scam. The majority of legitimate banking sites never ask for this type of information via e-mail.
In this type of fraud, we should highlight a series of phrases which may appear in the e-mails associated with Phishing attacks:
- "Verify your account" - mentioning that there is some type of problem to give the message more credibility
- "We will cancel your account if there is no reply within 24 hours" - or any other message which urges you to take prompt action.
- "You have won a prize / the lottery" or "you have been selected..." - or similar phrases.
- Other phrases which accuse you of some kind of illegal activity (pirating music or films, for example) and offering and amnesty or to cancel the debt if you make a payment (the "Police Virus").
These are some of the phrases which indicate possible Phishing activities and which should be ignored or avoided to prevent this type of fraud.
This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.