When Christmas comes around , we relax and let our guard down as it is a festive time to share with our friends and family. Precisely for this reason, these are dates chosen by cybercriminals to carry out their attacks, especially those involving social engineering , where they gain our trust to spread fraud, viruses and all kinds of malicious software with which to infect our computers, steal private information and defraud financially.
In this post we will tell you all about these Christmas scams, how to identify them and how to react to them if you are a victim.
What are the most common scams?
Dangerous Christmas greetings . Looking like a legitimate “Happy australia phone number data Holidays” e-card, you may be caught off guard and download “Happy Holidays” after clicking on a link or opening an attachment.
Postcard image
Misleading online apps . Before downloading a “Christmas” app, we should be cautious and check who the developer is, see the ratings and comments from other users, the permissions it requires, etc. At this time of year, many new apps usually appear that allow us to add elements to photos, as well as create montages with Christmas messages or even animated gifs, although sometimes they are designed to steal our data by taking advantage of all the permissions they request during the installation process.
Christmas app image
Fake gift cards . This is a type of gift that is often used at Christmas, especially when we don't know what to buy for a specific person. If we are going to buy them online, it is important to find out about the store beforehand, since cybercriminals will try to trick us into buying gift cards through advertisements, emails or chat messages, which will turn out to be fraudulent.
Gift card images
Smishing messages . Christmas is the time of year when we receive the largest number of promotions and offers from shops, banks, telephone companies... Many of them arrive by SMS. That's why we have to be careful with smishing , a practice where scammers impersonate different entities to confirm personal and banking information "for security purposes".
