Are Phishing Emails increasing? – The Facts

BY Editor

Phishing emails are something we are all becoming more and more familiar with. A fake email, sent under a guise of a professional company, can ask people to send out personal details or even money. We would all like to think that we wouldn’t fall victim to such a scam, but surprisingly, more and more people are. This is probably because fraudsters are becoming more intelligent about how they contact you – sending professional looking emails that we wouldn’t think to question.

According to a recent report by cybersafe, 156 million phishing emails are sent out every day. Many of these get caught in our junk email folders. If you check your junk inbox, you may notice a few in there from time to time. They may look obviously scammy, and have been picked up by your email server and classed as ‘unsafe.’

However, 16 million phishing emails get through these email filters. Of these, half are opened, and of those, 10% of people click the link contained within it.

The link contained within the email could lead to a fake version of a company’s homepage (tip: check the URL and make sure it is EXACTLY as it should be.) Around 80,000 people take the bait at this stage and have their personal information stolen or used against them in some way.

Let’s not cast aspersions on those few who do click the link – some of these emails are very convincing. And why wouldn’t you believe that your bank wants you to contact them, or that you are due a tax refund, if the message you are seeing is convincing enough?

A recent example

Wonga were recently victims of a data breach, and customers’ email addresses were stolen. This meant that many scam emails and SMS messages were sent out claiming to offer a really great deal, but in reality this was not from Wonga and the scammers were asking for an upfront fee. Wonga opened a fraud hotline to help customers who were concerned about any fake communication that was sent to them.