TIPS TO KEEP YOUR PHONE AND DATA SAFE FROM PHISHING
After your phone gets stolen, you have to be careful about messages you receive especially messages from your bank, confirming a payment or transaction. You must be able to know that is ‘phishing’ scam. Get more definitions here
Phishing scam is when someone tries to trick (or hook) you (the fish) into sharing personal information with them online. It is usually done by email or SMS, or through sites that looks like ones you log into regularly.
There are common traits of phishing scams
Because these scammers already have your details, they greet you politely through a message like, ‘Hello, Mr./Mrs. First Name and Last Name….
They make you see reasons to trust them by offering you good opportunities like saying, ‘you won a promo’ or that they want to ‘send you some money’, so they need your account number.
After that, they post a link for you to click on which would be the beginning of you getting hacked. The link could direct you to something similar to a site have visited before. Once you put any details in that site, your information is already shared with the hackers.
Remember, most banks and other trustworthy institutions will not ask you to click a link. instead the will say something like, ‘please visit our site and log in into your account to take actions’
Phishing can also happen over the phone call. It is called Vishing (voice Phishing)- messages or calls which appears to come from a trusted sources and may instruct you to call a number and share personal information. To stay safe, always use trusted numbers, not the ones provided in the message.
Sometimes you could be browsing online and you could get an alert from the computer that says, ‘your computer is infected, click here to fix it.’ This could be a scam technique.
Although, not all alerts are scams. Those frequent alerts that ask you to update your device software and operating systems may seem annoying especially with the delay it usually takes, but often these updates patch holes in security. Because of these, scammers tend to target people who have not updated their devices.
Another could come as a pop-up ad on a website which could look like a regular computer alert which may frighten you to take quick action without thinking. This can lead to your information being stolen or being scammed into paying for things you don’t need. In this case, you can use pop- up blocker on Google Chrome which can help stop these harmful ads. Additionally, you can periodically scan your device for infections by using trusted anti-virus software’s like Norton, Avast, Kaspersky etc)
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