Digital Fraud Awareness – Protect Yourself From This Growing Problem

Hi, they, it’s Cathy Mellett here.

Video Transcript – And I just want to alert anyone in the LinkedIn environment to proceed with caution, even in environments where the trust level is actually increased. And I think LinkedIn would be one of those environments. Over the weekend, we had an approach from offshore in terms of somebody wanting Facebook advertising done, we’d gone through the process, I had hopped on to the number to have that WhatsApp call. So they took me from LinkedIn into WhatsApp in terms of having a continued dialogue. And once I was in that environment, I ascertained they wanted to meet up with me on Zoom, which again, set the cautious levels and to being less concerned because they wanted to do a face to face. And then they said to me before that meeting, what I mind taking a look at their proposal, so that I could then be prepared for the meeting.

So when I looked at this, you will see that they said it was a PDF, but when I looked at it, it was actually a zip file. So my team and I looked at it a little bit more cautiously. And when we went into it, we could see that there were some image files, which we could see. But there was some weird looking files at the back end of this zip file that did not make any sense to us. So I’ve sent this off to my IT team this morning. And what they’ve come back to us with is that it does look like it was a phishing type environment.

It may also look like there could have been things put onto my desktop, which would have run in the background. Obviously, they could put a little bit more effort into finding out what it is but the whole outcome is the file wasn’t great. And this was a hoax and whether it was malware. Spyware a phishing exercise. Purpose of me sharing this with you is to be cautious of any approaches that may be made to you or your team in any online environment.

Thanks guys.