The holiday season brings more shopping and more fraud! Protect yourself from scams this holiday season.
A scam can come in the form of an email, phone call, letter, or someone at your door. The holidays are the perfect time for scammers to prey–consumers change their spending habits, and the banks assume you’re holiday shopping when a strange charge comes through.
Email scams are the most common at Kettering Health Network. These scams will prompt you for personal information, direct you to a site that could potentially infect your system, or gain access to your system to illegally connect to network.
What can you do to avoid getting “hooked” by a phishing scam?
- Don’t reply to emails that ask for personal or financial information.
- Don’t email personal or financial information outside of the network without using encryption.
- Always be aware of attachments. Even ones that seem legitimate or benign can be potentially harmful.
- Watch for grammar and spelling errors. These are common in scam emails.
- Never click on links within emails when you are not familiar with the sender.
- If the email has a link, you can hover your pointer over the link (without clicking) and it will give you a display of the true destination of the link.
- Be wary of emails that seem urgent. This is done to get you to respond without thinking. For example, “respond now or your account will be cancelled.”
- Pay close attention to web addresses in emails and determine if they are in match with a legitimate site. For example, www.toys.com and www.toys.im-sneaky.com are not the same websites.
- Be cautious of any email that is addressed to the wrong person or to a generic Dear Sir or To Whom in May Concern.
No matter how diligent you are, phishing scams are successful because they have been intentionally designed to mislead you. If you feel you may have been tricked into clicking on an email that is not legitimate, contact iSupport immediately and enter a security incident. Remember that information security is everyone’s responsibility!