Detecting online scams is made more difficult by their spread across more channels than before. According to Elisa, this is a permanent change. Fewer and fewer Finns believe they recognize a cyber scam.
In its announcement, Elisa says that online fraudsters have developed their methods to become more and more sophisticated during 2023. The development also emerges in a survey commissioned by the company, in which only one in three of the respondents believe they can recognize scams if they come across one.
Even though there is more and more news about various online scams, says Elisa’s director of information security Teemu Mäkelä in the company’s announcement that the spread of scams on many different channels makes it difficult to identify them.
– In the past, scammers focused on certain channels, such as e-mail and phone calls, and you knew how to be on your guard in these channels. Now alongside these, social media, instant messaging and fake online stores have come permanently, which fraudsters use for their purposes, Mäkelä says.
13 percent of those who responded to the survey say that they have definitely been cheated, while a year ago the corresponding figure was 9 percent. As many as 35 percent of the respondents are worried about accidentally exposing their employer to a cyber attack. Awareness of risk is a healthy development, according to Mäkelä.
– Criminals most often try to enter companies by fishing for employees’ IDs. Scams targeting the M365 environment are becoming more common in workplaces, and personnel should be actively trained to recognize them, he continues.
Some’s importance as a fraud channel is growing
Nine out of ten respondents say they have encountered some kind of scam online. 70 percent of them have received a scam email, but almost 60 percent have already come across scams on social media as well.
Almost one in five has encountered a scam attempt in the form of a fake online store. According to Mäkelä, fake online stores, through which they try to collect payment information, among other things, are becoming more and more common.
– When creating fake websites, fraudsters use search engine optimization and thus cause harm even to big brands when fraudulent websites rise to the top of the search results, says Mäkelä.
Almost 90 percent of respondents to Elisa’s survey avoid clicking on suspicious links.
– Suspicious links are widely known to be wary of, they have been talked about for a long time. Still, scammers still take advantage of them and fall for them. Fraudsters today are skilled at using the annual calendar in their scams, imitating, for example, tax refund messages and package arrival notifications, Mäkelä illustrates.
Source: Elisa