What is phishing? Understand this scam and learn how to protect yourself

Another scam has emerged recently and its name is phishing! Let's learn more about this scam and learn tips to protect yourself!

Unfortunately, we live in a world where we need to be very careful with everything, as there are many ill-intentioned people out there, so we never know when someone is trying to trick us into something, right? 

With technological advances, many things have improved for all of us, as most of the things we used to do outside the house, we can now do at home. But, of course, these advances would not only be used for good things, so we need to pay close attention at all times to those around us or those we trust.

Many scams have started to appear on the internet over the years. A crime that many know as card cloning has become more common with online shopping, which many people may fall for on fake websites or end up giving data to a random person without knowing that they are falling for a scam.

Phishing is one of the new crimes that have emerged on the internet and has left many people worried, as it is a banking crime that, unfortunately, has gained a lot of strength. The numbers practically doubled between 2021 and 2022 with an increase of 97% according to a survey by PSafe.

In the first half of 2022, for example, there were more than 5 million attempts at this financial scam, so it is necessary to pay even more attention.

Below we will tell you everything you need to know about this crime, from what it is to some ways to protect yourself from this scam. Let's go!

What is phishing?

You may have already understood that phishing is a cybercrime, that is, a crime carried out over the internet in which criminals try to obtain confidential information such as credit card numbers, banking information, passwords or any other personal data.

They are able to obtain this information by pretending to be trustworthy and legitimate entities and using language that sounds very trustworthy and that many people are likely to fall for. The most common organizations they pretend to be are banks, phone companies, payment services, and popular online service providers that you may use.

In this cyber scam, the criminals' goal is to trick victims into clicking on links that seem trustworthy but are actually quite malicious, or even to pass on a code that the person receives via SMS so that they have access to confidential information on their cell phone. 

It is also possible that they send attachments within the conversation asking the person to open this attachment and within it there is infected malware managing to acquire the person's data and it may even be through a fake website, which looks a lot like any website that could be trusted, but is under their domain.

To be more successful in their scam attempts, criminals use psychological tactics such as fear, urgency or even reward, because this makes people act quickly and end up not having much time to suspect the authenticity of that contact.

The term phishing comes from the English word fishing, which translates to fishing, as their aim is to fish for people's confidential information. The original ph comes from “phreaks”, which is a term used to refer to the first internet hackers. The combination of the two was to become something like “hackers who fish”.

How to identify a phishing attack?

Although it is not easy to identify a phishing attack, there are some tips that can help you identify these attacks.

Be suspicious

Always be suspicious of messages that imply something very good or very bad, such as accounts about to be blocked or large prizes that you have won and even money that has been released in an old account.

Please note the email

When a hacker comes to impersonate an institution via email, always check what the person's email account is, especially what comes after the @, since these organizations will never use common providers such as Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, among others.

Spelling mistakes

Also, take note of any spelling mistakes in the person's message, as this could be a telltale sign of a scam, as a real organization will not send you a message containing such mistakes.

Hover over links

Always hover your mouse over the link you receive before clicking, as this will allow you to see whether the link is from the real website or if it is just masquerading as a website and is actually another one.

What can I do to protect myself from this scam?

Now that you know some ways to identify these scams, it's time to learn how to protect yourself from them.

It is important that you always check that you are shopping within a trustworthy marketplace and you can confirm this by checking the entire website and also checking the payment methods. No trustworthy website will ask for your password or any information beyond the basics that every shopping website asks for.

You need to read the reviews on that site as well and see if there are any comments outside of that site that indicate that it could be a scam as well.

You can protect yourself from these scams by reading about that company through Reclame Aqui as well, which is a website that searches for quality and customer satisfaction indexes.

Also, don't click on any website that promises miraculous offers that are too good to be true, always be suspicious and start doing your research before proceeding. 

You can also ask the person who contacted you what the purpose of using your data is, as this is provided for in the LGPD, the General Data Protection Law, as this can scare hackers and cause them to end the contact.

Another way to protect yourself is to check the website's URL to see if there are any letters changed or anything strange there and also check the payment area to see if there are any requests for data that are unusual on other websites.

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