High risk before Christmas – Check whether you can reliably identify e-mails from fraudsters

Of course, there are con artists in real life, but online scams are far easier to automate and send to tons of potential victims. If you don’t believe that, a look at your spam filter in the e-mail inbox will help. But not everything is discovered there immediately.

There are plenty of practical examples: Most of the time, the scammers rely on big brands like DHL, Postbank, Sparkasse or PayPal and try to rip off users with fake links or manipulated file attachments.

You can test how good your eye is at recognizing fraudulent e-mails, for example with the online test from the Norton Research Group:

Do you recognize the scam?

The phishing test (via CHIP) can be carried out safely. He presents you with various emails, all of which urge you to take some action. Some of the messages aim to rip you off, but there are also “real” concerns where you should actually follow the embedded links.

In the test you can check whether your eye is trained well enough to unmask the scammers. For each email shown, there is not only an assessment of whether you were right or wrong, but also a brief explanation of the most important characteristics of fraudulent emails.

Watch out for big events

During the big shopping events Black Week, Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday, it is not only high season for bargain hunters on the Internet, online criminals are also more active than usual.

This is reported by Arne Allisat, head of the mail security teams at WEB.DE and GMX.
Germany’s most used e-mail providers are currently registering an increase in spam and phishing attacks of around 20 percent.

“Spam and phishing work particularly well when victims are under pressure. If you get an email with a really cheap offer, you may not look too closely or become careless. It’s easy to make mistakes or fall into a trap that you would have recognized had you been a little calmer,” says Allisat. Popular scams:

• Parcel Service Method:
  The victims receive a phishing email that looks confusingly similar to the original notifications from DHL, DPD, UPS or Hermes. It contains a link with a payment request to allegedly pay small shipping fees of a few euros. In this way, the attackers not only receive the money, but also access the access data for online banking or the PayPal account of their victims.
• Fake Coupons:
  Here it is suggested that you can secure a particularly high discount or credit with a large shopping platform such as Amazon, Otto or Zalando. All you have to do is register with the respective platform via a link in the e-mail. The link then leads to a fraudster’s website, which at first glance cannot be distinguished from the original. If the user registers on this website, his access data goes directly to the scammers – who can then make purchases on someone else’s account