Smishing, vishing and phishing are all scam tactics that could be used to trick savers into providing their personal information to fraudsters. Roughly £190billion is stolen from consumer pockets in the UK every year, lost to scams and fraudsters that could’ve been avoided if savers knew what to look for.
Smishing, vishing and phishing are all terminology used relating to scams on different mediums where a fraudster will impersonate a person or organisation to convince their victim to provide money or personal information to them.
NS&I has provided warnings for all three of these scam types, noting what savers should look out for and what genuine communication from the savings organisation will actually look like.
Smishing
Smishing utilises text messages to scam victims, where fraudsters can often look very convincing.
Smishing texts are designed to convince victims to provide something over the text message.
Alternatively, texts may use a link to a website that appear genuine where users will be asked for personal information such as login details.
Due to the medium of this scam, it can be more difficult to spot that it is not genuine communication from NS&I.
Scams generally utilise a sense of urgency or worry to make victims feel at risk and in turn ignore their common sense.
NS&I noted that in the case of smishing, this can include messages like:
- “Your account has been blocked. Please click the following link to verify your account log-in to gain access.”
- “Your account…
