The Top 3 Christmas Cyber Frauds (and how to avoid them)

It’s that time of year again – Christmas is around the corner and many of us will be looking forward to some down time with our families and friends.

There is one industry that never has time off – fraudsters and criminals. The Christmas break is actually a very busy time for them; lots of opportunity to part people from their money and data whilst our guards are down.

At Trichromic we take cybercrime very seriously and to help you out we spoke to our local bobby who kindly flagged up his ‘top 3’ frauds and how to avoid them:

Money transfers

An authentic online seller will ask you to pay by card on a secure payment page, or occasionally by cheque. However tempted you are because ‘it’s the last one in stock’ or it’s ‘two days before Christmas’, never transfer money directly into the seller’s bank account.

Mobile payments

More and more people are using mobile devices, especially smartphones to make purchases. Data is usually stored in the phone’s memory and may be compromised if the device is ‘hacked’ or stolen.

Do not save passwords or personal/financial data onto your mobile device unless it is absolutely necessary and make sure the phone is passcode protected.

If stolen, most mobile devices have the software to wipe all data from their memory remotely – learn how this works.

Christmas E-cards

Yep. This one surprised us as well. An increasing number of Christmas cards are being sent via email and whilst most are genuine, be aware that cyber-criminals are creating their own versions, which you do not want to open.

The email may contain a virus (malware) that will embed itself onto your electronic device – all without your knowledge – and then collect personal data, financial information, passwords, and usernames which can then be used to commit fraud.

If you need advice on avoiding the cyber criminals, please give our friendly team a call on 020 3327 0310. And do look out for our next Top 3 which will hit your inbox soon.

Have a wonderful Christmas and a cybersafe New Year.

Lauren Anderson

2022-02-01

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2022-01-14

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2022-01-10

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2022-01-10

We have used the services of TriChromic for our personal and business IT requirements and they have always provided an excellent service. We would happily recommend who has a similar requirement. i am sure you will not be disapponted

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2022-01-10

Alex , Lloyd and the Team at Trichromic Have supported all of our IT requirements for many years . Assisting in both Cloud services and new integrated accounts and processing systems to meet the high demands of our wide customer base. Always prompt to investigate and remedy an issues and always ahead of the game in the latest security and Malware issues that all businesses must counter . You wont go far wrong in phoning Alex or Lloyd should you consider revenging your IT provider .

Stuart O'Neill

2020-08-14

Very professional set up. They know their stuff.

David Collins

2017-05-30

Technology is vital for our business, we cannot operate without a sound and reliable base. The team at Trichromic deliver that to us. They act on their promises and we know we can trust them 100%, a rare trait in service providers generally.

Money transfers

Mobile payments

Christmas E-cards