IRISH Water have warned the public to be vigilant against an email phishing scam, which is being used to impersonate the State agency and solicit account details.
Scammers sent emails to addresses nationwide claiming to be the company and requesting users to login through a hyperlink for “annual account maintenance”.
The bogus email, which uses the Irish Water logo, states the following: “Irish Water is performing the annual account maintenance procedure. Please login to your account and complete the requested actions.
“Once you logged in you will be guided to the rest of the process. Log into My Water now to complete the maintenance.”
Spokeswoman for Irish Water Florence White told the Herald that the scam has nothing to do with the utility company and that all customer account details are secure.
“Technically speaking, it has nothing to do with us, but the people sending out these emails are purporting to be from Irish Water, so we just want people to be aware that it’s not us,” Ms White said. “It’s people right across the country, it’s not specific to Irish Water customers.
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“They don’t have any of our customer information, and I don’t know where they got the email addresses from”.
The company received notice of the scam through social media and have instructed the public not to open the email and to delete it immediately.
The agency insist that they will never ask customers for financial information in this way and say that they have no idea how many people received the email. They will also not be following up on the issue with the gardai.
“If you got an email then you would be the one that would report it, because the criminal activity was looking to access your information,” Ms White said.
“Irish Water data is absolutely secure. We would have no way of knowing who the emails went to because we didn’t send them, so we’d have no way of knowing what complaint we could make to the gardai.”
This is the third high-profile phishing scam in six months – with student support agency SUSI the victim of a similar issue in August.
In November, an email was distributed from phishers purporting to be Electric Ireland, telling customers to login to their online billing account to view their refund status.