We’ve been getting a bunch of emails lately, that pretend to originate from major online retailers, such as Amazon, Target, Kohl’s and even Wal-Mart.
These are, in fact, phishing emails that pretend to offer discounts, gift cards, and other benefits; some in reference to the oncoming Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals.
Consumers should be aware that although online retailers do provide coupons and discounts via email, phishing emails constitute the majority of these targeted mailings.
DomainTools and its security department conducted a survey in the US and the UK, to get a pulse on how many people are aware of cyber phishing scams, how many have been deceived, and at what cost.
According to DomainTools:
The results show that while overall awareness is high – more than 90 percent of respondents are familiar with phishing – the cleverness of the schemes have made victims out of 39 percent of U.S. shoppers and 20 percent of UK shoppers. Many said they have been duped more than once.
The consequences of clicking through phishing scam emails targeting consumers during the holiday season, can be staggering, as this graph shows:
For a detailed analysis of the DomainTools survey, click here.
In the UK, We’ve also recently seen a run of unicode phishing scams sent via Whatsapp – supposedly offering discount vouchers if you fill in a survey – but the “survey” is just to get your personal details.
Typically use accented characters, with very small accents, like “asḍa” instead of “asda” or “tesċo” instead of “tesco” – in Whatsapp they look pretty much identical.