Black Friday Scams… and how to avoid them

Black Friday sales are a great opportunity to bag a bargain. And cyber fraudsters are acutely aware of this. In fact, you can bet your sales savings that they have been honing their deception skills and putting their devious plans into place well before the November sales day.

With this in mind and with cyber fraud at an all-time high, £1.1 billion during 2016 according to accountants KPMG, consumer cyber security experts BullGuard have put together some very useful tips that will help you avoid the cyber criminals during the Black Friday sales.

Watch out for phishing mails

As Black Friday approaches cyber fraudsters get seriously busy crafting phishing emails. These emails are endlessly creative and claim to be from all sorts of organisations that you will know from well-known retailers, sports suppliers and even travel companies. The one thing they have in common is an offer that is too good to ignore. Except that’s exactly what you should do, ignore and bin them.

The aim of the fraudsters is to get you to click on a link. This can either take you through to a website that requests you enter all your personal information to get the offer, or you will inadvertently download some malware that will steal your personal information. Either way you will have been duped. You will have just handed your information over to a fraudster and you certainly won’t be benefiting from any offers.