Now that Christmas is getting closer and closer, you may be in the middle of shopping for gifts, but the truth is that it is one of the most threatening periods that we can experience when it comes to receiving notifications on our mobile phones about attractive discounts and promotions. In recent days, cybersecurity experts have detected a fake email campaign that can invade your privacy and turn your Christmas into a real nightmare. How to avoid it?
The festive season of Easter is usually one of the most joyful and emotional of the year, but at the same time it also becomes one of the most susceptible to being manipulated by groups of sophisticated hackers willing to make Christmas miserable for citizens. And cybercriminals do not rest even on vacation, so it is necessary to always be alert so that no one tries to sneak it in.
In this case, INCIBE (National Cybersecurity Institute) has echoed a wave of emails impersonating Leroy Merlin, one of the most recognized household goods stores in Spain, which are already causing real havoc to anyone who clicks on them and falls into the trap. Below, we describe how to identify this scam and what to do so that it does not affect you.
If you receive this email, do not open it: It’s a scam!
With the arrival of Christmas offers, many of us are on the lookout to see how much money we can save and thus hurry to buy the Christmas gift at the best price. However, we cannot relax and intuit that we are going to benefit if we find a good deal and even more so when we see that we can receive free items. Experience tells us that if they offer us something for free without any justification, we should shy away from it.
This is what the organizations that ensure our security through the Internet try to warn us about. Without going any further, several emails have been circulating for a few days pretending to be from the Leroy Merlin store. In the details of its content, it can be seen that the objective of the criminals is to share a survey that users must complete to later receive a supposed totally free gift. What they are trying to convey is that this gift can be obtained easily and quickly, as long as they fill out all their confidential information. But there is one condition, you must provide your bank details to pay the shipping costs. In this case, the object to be obtained is a set of tools.
In the subject lines of the emails you can find various incentives for you to click on the ad and the links. Some examples are:
- Your experience with Leroy Merlin could win you a Dexter Tool Set!
- We have a surprise for Leroy Merlin clients
- Complete our Leroy Merlin survey and unlock a Dexter Toolkit!
- Take our Leroy Merlin survey and be entered to win a Dexter tool set!
How to avoid the scam
There is no doubt that this technique known as phishing wants to attract a large number of victims to steal all their credentials, so you need to carry out a series of recommendations in order to safeguard your reputation:
- Never provide your banking passwords or give names or addresses to unknown forms.
- Do not click on links or advertising that may seem misleading. Nobody offers you anything for free in exchange for something.
- Look at the website domain and contrast this address with the company’s official page.
- Take screenshots of everything you have received, as well as any suspicious pages you have visited.
- Report the incident to the nearest Police office so that they can intervene as soon as possible.
