Say No To Romance Scams This Valentine’s Day: Check Out These Security Tips For Shoppers

Valentine’s Day is just around the corner – and the day means business for everyone – restaurants, stores, couples, and cybercriminals alike. While online dating has been steadily growing in popularity for years now, with it has also come an increase in the amount of online romance scams that leave victims with shattered hearts and empty wallets.

While working online, from home, hills and remotely, many turned towards searching for love online. Interpol issued a warning to its 194 member nations, including India, last year, warning that fraudsters were using dating apps to defraud individuals and urging users to be cautious and safe while going into online relationships.

Check Point Research (CPR), which provides leading cyber threat intelligence to Check Point Software customers and the greater intelligence community, sees an increase in malicious activity targeting shoppers seeking to buy gift’s for Valentine’s Day. 

The registration of theme-specific, spoofed domains is a tactic that cybercriminals use to take advantage of a specific event in order to lure victims into a trap of revealing personal information, warns CPR.

Here are some security tips for Valentine’s Day shoppers this year:

ALWAYS be suspicious of password reset emails: By sending a fake password reset email that directs you to a lookalike phishing site, attackers can convince you to type in your account credentials and send those to them. If you receive an unsolicited password reset email, always visit the website directly (don’t click on embedded links) and change your password to something different on that site (and any other sites with the same password).

Never EVER share your credentials: Credential theft is a common goal of cyberattacks. Many people reuse the same usernames and passwords across many different accounts, so stealing the credentials for a single account is likely to give an attacker access to a number of the user’s online accounts. As a result, phishing attacks are designed to steal login credentials in various ways

BEWARE of too good to be true buying offers, as they are really too good and not true: An 80% discount on a new iPhone or an item of jewellery is usually not a reliable or trustworthy purchase opportunity.

ALWAYS verify you are ordering online from an authentic source: Do NOT click on promotional links in emails, instead Google your desired retailer and click the link from the Google results page.

Look for linguistic Errors: Spelling and grammar errors are another sign of phishing emails. Most companies use spell check, so these typos should raise suspicion because the email may not originate from the claimed source.

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