30 ways to stop scams article discussion

tempus_fugit

LancsAmbassador said:

WARNING: 'NATWEST' SCAM. I recently received a mail that appeared to be from NatWest, my bank. I see scam mails regularly, so I'm accustomed to being vigilant, but this one was very clever, and it got past my Avast filter. When I moved my mouse over the sender's name to check, it appeared as customerservice@natwestsecure.com, so I opened it.

The mail said NatWest had received a request to change my mobile phone number, and the new number would become active within 24 hrs. Further down the mail was a 'Click here to cancel' link. I hit it. It took me to a series of pages that looked like the regular NatWest online banking login procedure. It was only at the 3rd page I had suspicions, so I rang the NatWest fraud team. They confirmed they had not mailed me.

I then looked up to see the web address of the 'login' page to which I was connected and saw it was peppered-mango.join.glitch.me. If the website name alone wasn't dubious, that .me at the end meant the site was registered in Mexico!

Here's my tip: if you click a link in a mail you're unsure about, check the web address of the page you go to. It ahould be obvious if it's not your bank, Paypal, Amazon Prime etc.

Mexico's TLD is  .mx, not .me. The .me domain is intended for personal websites as opposed to commercial ones so that you can use it instead of .com or co.uk. Still kind of dodgy, of course.

In any event, the advice always is "never click on a link, even if you think the website is genuine". I would have contacted the bank via normal means first and they would have confirmed that it was not sent by them, as you eventually did and found out. If people stuck to that advice instead of going ahead and clicking links without thinking a large majority of scams would not get anywhere.