Giving gift vouchers as Christmas presents is always popular and this year is no exception. Many gift card-themed scams were detected over Thanksgiving weekend that offered free or cheap gift cards to lure online shoppers into parting with their credit card details.
2018 has seen a surge in business email compromise (BEC) style tactics, with emails seeming to have been sent from within a company. The emails purport to have been sent from the CEO (or another executive) asking for accounts and administration staff purchase gift cards for clients or requesting gift cards be purchased to be used for charitable donations.
To minimize the risk from gift card scams and other holiday-themed phishing emails, companies must ensure they have strong spam filtering technology in place to block the emails at source and prevent them from landing in inboxes.
Consumers can be tricked into parting with credit card details, but businesses too are in danger. Most of these campaigns are carried out in order to gain access to login credentials or are used to install malware. If an end user responds to such a scam while at work, it is their employer that will be hit with the cost of being hacked.
2018 has seen many businesses targeted with gift card scams. The latest reports from Proofpoint suggest that out of the organizations that have been targeted with email fraud attacks, almost 16% had witnessed a gift card-themed attack: Up from 11% in Q2, 2018.
Many corporations businesses have Office 365 installed, but even Microsoft’s anti-phishing security has allowed phishing emails to slip through the net, especially at businesses that have not paid extra for advanced phishing protection. Even with the advanced anti-phishing security measures, emails still make it past Microsoft’s filters.
To obstruct these malicious messages, an advanced third-party spam filter is necessary.