Common cyber scams on Black Friday
November 26 is celebrated on Black Friday and businesses offer discounts and criminals take the opportunity to run their cyber scams
Black Friday is celebrated every November 26, and businesses take the opportunity to settle discounts and offers that attract consumers. In many cases such offers are used by criminals to deceive with false free products or impersonating a parcel company and commit cyber scams.
Since 2012, Black Friday and Cyber Monday have become popular in Spain and other countries, which aims to offer important discounts to its customers at the beginning of Christmas. The eCommerce and physical stores accumulate sales record for that date.
The purchase of products online increases during Black Friday, activating cybercrime. The cybersecurity company ESET conducted a study where it determined the four most common cyber scams for this occasions:
- Free products: This strategy is very popular within cyber scammers, who use social media to fill out a survey or intervene the likes to end up scamming customers through “pay in a click”.
- Delivery company spoofing: Cyber criminals pretend to be a delivery o transportation. They send an email or SMS with the name of a well-known company in the market (Phishing) and when the message is opened it runs a ransomware that encodes the computer files and requests a reward for their decoding.
- Typing Errors: ‘Typesquatting’ is a big threat. The cyber attackers takes advantage of the errors users make when typing a web address. They use it to redirect to a fake page, with a name very similar to the original, which was designed to host malicious ‘software’ that infect the user’s device, offer contests or advertisements for unreliable services to steal users’ data or money.
- Amazing discounts: It is important that users apply common sense to differentiate a real offer from a cyber scam. It is very significant that they check if it really is a legal page by looking at the spelling, the content it displays, or the description of the company. Also, they should contact the company directly and carefully observe the comments of other clients.
M. Rodríguez
Source: europapress
