(Updated 2 June 2023)

Fraudsters are everywhere, and their schemes evolve at lightning speed – becoming more frequent and also more sophisticated and ranging from phishing to various online scams. With fraud on the up, we need to be vigilant and take every precaution to secure our personal information and safeguard our accounts from scammers.

What is phishing?

The tactic used by scammers to trick you into giving out confidential and sensitive information such as your passwords, PINs, and account details. They use email, SMS and voice calls etc to impersonate your contacts or mimic a brand, product, or company believed to be known, trusted or ‘safe’.

Why is phishing such a high risk?

Phishing attacks remain the most common method that scammers use to gain access to victims’ confidential and sensitive information.

Phishing is an effective way for scammers to trick victims by leveraging human emotions such as fear or curiosity, tricking them to click on a malicious link, open an attachment, or disclose confidential information.

The Most Common Types of Phishing Attacks

Email phishing

The majority of phishing attacks are sent by email. The scammer will register a fake email address that mimics a genuine organisation and send thousands of generic requests. 

The fake address often contains character substitution or the use of the organisation’s name in part of the email address (such as XYZ@vodacomrewards.co.za).

Smishing and vishing

With both smishing and vishing, phones replace emails as a communication method. Text messages are used for Smishing, and utilise similar content to phishing emails. Vishing is done via a telephone conversation. 

A common vishing scam involves a scammer posing as an employee of a bank or financial institution telling the victim that their account has been breached. The scammer will then ask the victim to provide account details to verify their identity.

About Warning signs (Red Flags):

Red flags are a tell-tale sign of danger or a problem. Paying attention to these signs can help you identify or alert you to a phishing attack.

Here are some of the factors you need to look at if you're suspicious of a phishing attack.

From Field: 

An email coming from an unknown address.
You know the sender (or the organisation), but the email is unexpected or out of character.

To Field:

You were copied on an email and you don’t know the other people it was sent to.

Date/Time:

You receive an email that you would usually get during normal business hours, at odd hours say 05:00 am

Hyperlinks:

There are misspellings in the link. When you hover your cursor over the link, the link address is for a different website.

Subject Line:

The subject line of an email is irrelevant or doesn’t match the message content.
It’s an email about something you never requested or a receipt for something you never purchased.

Content:

The sender is asking you to take an action, click on a link or open an attachment. You have an uncomfortable feeling, or it just seems odd or illogical.

Attachments:

Any attachment you receive that you aren’t expecting.

Staying safe from phishing emails:

• Do not open attachments or click on links in emails or messaging services such as SMS or social media that come from senders you don’t know or recognise.
• Be especially cautious if someone sends you a downloadable, executable or zip file.
• Never provide sensitive information – for example, personal or account details, passwords, PINs or usernames to any unknown parties whether by email, SMS, voice or chat boxes.
• Check the domain name where the email has been sent from – sometimes, these will be obviously fake, other times they might use a part of a reputable organisation's name or implicate some part of the email address.
• Immediately change your passwords and PINs if you suspect your accounts or online security has been compromised and notify the relevant financial institutions.
• Raise the alarm about suspicious online activities or fraudulent attempts directly with the implicated source – report these to the company, organisation or service provider being impersonated and warn family and friends.

For a wider range of articles to broaden your knowledge of the dangers prevalent online, check out our digital fraud overview.