mobile phone scammers are using the FIFA World Cup
mobile phone scammers are using the FIFA World Cup to tempt Australians into providing their personal banking details in exchange for millions of dollars in phantom prizes.
While these recent incidents occurred in Australia, there’s no doubt that scammers around the world will seek opportunities to take advantage wherever possible. In fact, in anticipation of this activity FIFA warns fans everywhere to be wary of these scams and hoaxes and that “Prize draws and competitions offering tickets to the FIFA World Cup can only be held by companies who are commercially affiliated with FIFA, such as, for example, sponsors.”
With the England match this afternoon we thought it might make a topical piece worth exploring?
One of our clients, the mobile messaging specialists Airwide Solutions would love to help. Their Chief Marketing Officer, Jay Seaton has developed a set of guidelines to help protect people:
“Working with mobile operators worldwide to address mobile security threats, here at Airwide, we’ve come up with a list of some precautions that you, as end-users, can take to prevent being scammed:
Contact your mobile operator to find out if they have personal security controls they could enable so you, as a subscriber, can limit whom you receive text messages from.
Work with your operator to set up individual blacklists and white lists and manage personalised blocking of specific keywords.
Find out if your operator has capabilities they can tap into to classify certain senders or pieces of content as unwanted.
Always report spam either to your operator via one of the customer service channels or through specific reporting channels that some operators have set up. Some operators have outlined processes for reporting SMS spam and even handset applications that will allow for reporting of specific spam messages, etc.
Tackling these SMS issues is an important step in mobile security and carriers are in a critical position to combat these threats with antispam and fraud solutions—especially during major events like the World Cup.”
