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Share Phishing scams are on a rise in India. Easy availability of sophisticated tools such as ChatGPT and other gen-AI-based tools have only exacerbated the matter. As per recent reports, scammers are using chatbots impersonating as real people for defrauding people. A separate report says that AI-based tools are increasingly being used in phishing scams and these scams have increased in days leading up to Valentine’s Day.
According to a recent report by cyber-security firm, Check Point, January saw the creation of 18,171 new domains containing ‘Valentine’ or ‘love’, which indicates a 39 percent increase from the previous month and a 17 percent increase from the year before. While this might seem trivial at first, but the report says that one out of every eight of these domains was found to be malicious or risky.
What’s more? The report says that scammers are using emails promoting Valentine’s Day special offers for duping users. One of the examples of such scams are the emails sent from the address info@bestqualitymak\.com. “The email offers to fill a survey and receive a special Stanley Valentine’s cup, with a photo which seems to be a fake for the actual Stanley brand (which has an official website – stanley1913.com). It also adds a sense of urgency saying that “this survey offer expires today”,” the cyber security firm wrote in a blog post, adding that the website in the link has been identified as malicious by security vendors and is currently not active.
What’s concerning is that the report says that this website has been used to steal personal and payment information. Needless to say, that clicking on such links could lead to the money loss, information theft or even malware infections.
So, here are five tips that will help you protect yourself from Valentine’s Day phishing scams:
— Don’t reply or click on links from email address you are not aware of.
— Don’t open attachments from email addresses you are not aware of
— Do not give away any information, personal or financial, on any platform.
— Be wary of email attachments such as ZIP files or documents that require enabling macros. Scammers could be using that for downloading malware on your device.
— Look for emails with inconsistencies in language and tone. Despite the use of AI, language of fraudsters hasn’t improved a lot and can be used as a red flag for detecting scams.
Get latest Tech and Auto news from Techlusive on our WhatsApp Channel, Facebook, X (Twitter), Instagram and YouTube.Author Name | Shweta Ganjoo
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