Email phishing scams are nothing new. In fact, they’ve been around for as long as email has, attempting to convince people to hand over their details before scamming them further. However, a new breed of phishing scam has hit Vodafone customers, who are now being warned about one of the most realistic scams yet.
The government backed Get Safe Online resource for consumers to protect themselves from online fraud, shared a tweet warning that whilst the initial ‘Vodafone’ bill might look authentic, the link to view your bill leads to an obvious fake, designed to capture your details.
The email claims that the customer overs over £400 for their latest phone or broadband bill, an amount clearly designed to panic users into clicking on the link and therefore giving away their details.
Thankfully though, there’s an easy way to tell that the email is a scam – look at the email address. Although the sender shows a convincing @vodafone address, the actual email address that follows is clearly not.
It follows a similar scam which had iTunes users receive a fake invoice for £90 purchases and have them download a piece of software, which would then take control of the files on the computer and hold them to ransom. The effects of such a scam were widely felt when the NHS and other large organisations around the world were hit by the WannaCry ransomware, which demanded money to release files.
Phishing scams aren’t limited to email either, with WhatsApp users recently being targeted with notifications of incoming subscription fees, despite the fact that WhatsApp is free.
The best advice for any email that you receive from Vodafone that you’re not sure about is to find the contact details for Vodafone and get in touch with their customer services department and speak to them about it. They’ll be able to confirm whether the correspondence is from them, or a third party.
Of course, if you’re confident about where your email is coming from, there’s nothing to be afraid of. The only way to reliably stop scammers is to pay just that little bit more attention when you’re considering giving out your private information.