Many people cannot reliably recognize phishing emails

Many people cannot reliably recognize phishing emails

Cybercriminals are becoming more and more inventive in their attempts to gain access to bank accounts. It is often difficult to distinguish between fraudulent emails and genuine messages from the bank.Fraud or real message from the bank? According to a survey, many consumers have difficulty distinguishing phishing emails that criminals use to gain access to their account or securities account from real emails from their bank. 

In the survey commissioned by the Federal Association of Consumer Organizations (vzbv), more than half (57 percent) of the 1,035 respondents expressed suspicion of fraud in attacks by criminals. However, according to vzbv information from Thursday, this also applied to more than a third (38 percent) of the real emails and payment transactions show

“Phishing emails, SMS and fake calls: Cybercriminals’ scams are getting better and better,” said vzbv board member Ramona Pop. Phishing emails are designed to trick victims into downloading or clicking on malware. In this way, criminals want to gain access to digital identities such as passwords, email addresses or bank details. Fraudsters pursue the same goal through fake calls from alleged bank employees or fake SMS message

BKA: New quality of phishing due to 

The head of the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), Holger Münch, recently reported that phishing had “reached a new dimension in terms of quantity and quality” last year. On the one hand, the number of registered phishing websites has continued to increase, and on the other hand, the importance of artificial intelligence is increasing. AI is being used more and more frequently by cybercriminals to generate texts for their phishing campaigns that then hardly contain any linguistic or formal errors. “And that makes it more difficult for those attacked to recognize corresponding phishing emails and websites,” warned Münch.

Consumer advocate Pop reiterated that the results of the vzbv survey show that consumers “cannot reliably distinguish fraudulent intentions from genuine emails from their bank”. Banks and other payment service providers should therefore not unilaterally pass on damage caused by cyber attacks to customer

Financial regulator Bafin gives tips for recognizing fra

In the case of the phishing attacks that the survey participants were confronted with, just 24 percent were so sure that they had recognized suspected fraud that they did not respond to the request in the email. Even with the real emails, however, 19 percent refused to follow the information sent by the bank

“Urgent security warning for your online banking! Immediate action is required: Click on the button and update your access data” - the text of a fraudulent message could read something like this. In an information sheet published on Thursday, the financial regulator Bafin lists examples of fraud and gives tips on how consumers can recognize such scams. Bafin's advice: If you are unsure whether an email is genuine, you should ask your bank directly..uds. AIs.n.