With the arrival of the holiday season and with scammers becoming more creative, the Better Business Bureau (BBB) of South Dakota is advising residents to use extreme caution concerning “phishing” scams.
Phishing is the act of trying to acquire usernames, passwords and financial information by acting as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication, according to the BBB. It is most often performed through emails, but is also done through phone calls and, more recently, by text messaging.
“It is very common any more to get these phishing scams, even if you have really good spam filters. They’re just constantly looking for ways around that,” said BBB state director Jessie Schmidt. “What happens is that you either go to the site or click on the link, and it can load malware on your computer that searches for sensitive financial data.”
One phishing scam that has surfaced recently that concerns area residents are emails from scammers posing as representatives of Wells Fargo. The message states that the customer’s online account has been restricted because of failed login attempts, and it instructs the recipient to follow a fraudulent link to solve the problem.
Larry Young, Wells Fargo market president for southeast South Dakota, said this sort of activity generally picks up during this time of the year.
“You see a lot more transactions with the holidays,” Young said. “People are doing more online — using their debit cards and credit cards and things like that — and so the volume of scams tends to pick up when transactions are higher.”
Young stressed that Wells Fargo will never send fraud alerts via email. If the bank were to contact a customer about information such as with suspicious activity concerning an account, it would phone that customer and ask for a specific password. The bank will also never request Social Security numbers or date of birth through electronic communication.
If Wells Fargo customers are asked for such information, Young said they can call the 800 number on the back of their debit/credit cards, report the concern by forwarding the email to reportphish@wellsfargo.com, or by contacting their bank directly.
“Nothing is better than going in to your local branch and working with your local banker,” he said.
In addition to email, Schmidt said text messages have recently become a popular form of communication for phishing scammers.
“It’s the same thing — ‘You have been selected’ or ‘You have been identified as’ — that you would get in your email,” she said.
Schmidt said one of the more recent phishing texts that has targeted consumers is a message stating that the person has won a $1,000 Target gift card — a ploy that has also been used by email scammers in the past.
“If you click on it, it could load something onto your phone,” she said. “You might do your banking on your phone. You may have your Social Security information or your credit card information stored on your phone. And it just seeks out all that sort of information.”
Schmidt said what makes such scams hard to identify is that not only will the messages use familiar logos and other proprietary information, but also many of them will also seem very timely.
“There’s always just enough truth to them that makes you think, ‘Oh my gosh, this is true, cause I just bought something here, or I was just at this website, or I was just at my bank,’” she said. “They have just enough elements of truth to make you think it might be true. It’s terribly frustrating.”
To spot a fake email or text message, the BBB recommends hovering over the links to check whether the URL leads to the actual business’ website or, with a scam, a third-party site. Messages should also be read carefully for signs it might be fake, such as misspellings, poor grammar or generic greetings.
If the message is in fact a phishing scam, the BBB advises people to not click on any link or attachment and to delete the message completely (also deleting them from trash bins or folders). If a link was clicked, an anti-virus software’s full system scan should be used.
Schmidt added that one of the most important aspects of safeguarding against phishing scams is to always be on the lookout for suspicious activity.
“Almost any unsolicited message that you get from an organization you should consider to be spam,” she said. “It’s a chronic problem, and people have to always be on their guard.”
For more information on phishing and other scams, visit the BBB’s regional website at http://nebraska.bbb.org/scam-source/.
You can follow Derek Bartos on Twitter at twitter.com/d_bartos