UAE residents are warned against the rising cases of scams involving fake deliveries and prizes, with some scammers even using popular platforms such as WhatsApp.
Tatyana Shcherbakova, senior web analyst at online security firm Kaspersky, said that there has been an increase in scams involving fake deliveries as people seek ways to adapt to the coronavirus pandemic.
“In this case, and ever since the pandemic started, we’ve seen an increase in scams related to the delivery topic where criminals ask victims to pay a little sum of money for a fake ‘pending’ delivery,” Shcherbakova said, as reported by The National.
Shcherbakova said that such scams at times happen through emails containing details about a fake package and asking the victim for payment so that the package can be delivered.
Aside from fake deliveries, scams are also existent in popular messaging platforms such as WhatsApp wherein scammers say that a certain victim won a prize, but has to shoulder the delivery costs to claim it.
Other scams prevalent during the pandemic include phishing scam, said Shcherbakova. This entails sending of emails containing fake website links to a number of victims.
If a victim clicks on the website, the scammers can get their personal or financial information.
“Criminals often rely on spam and phishing to try and trick users. One method used is social engineering, where criminals try to manipulate users into clicking on a malicious link and eventually giving out sensitive information like credit card details,” Shcherbakova said.
