Presented by KIS Finance
There are over five and a half million cyber offences being committed every year, which now accounts for over half of all crime in the UK. This means that nearly 1 in 10 people are now falling victim to fraud and cybercrime - targets mainly being people who use their computer to bank and shop, or, to hold any type of personal information.
Action Fraud UK and Get Safe Online both report that during 2015/16 a staggering £10.9 billion was lost from the UK economy as a result of fraud and cybercrime. They estimated that the average amount of a single fraud to be £523!
In a recent survey of people who had been victims of fraud, 39% of those surveyed admitted that they never reported it. Other similar reports state that this figure could be as low as 10%.
The main reasons given why many fraud victims do not report it:
People may blame themselves and feel embarrassed.
They think that there isn’t anything that can be done to resolve the issue.
Some people choose to report the matter to their bank and credit card companies only, in a bid to gain back the money they lost.
Many people can’t be bothered to go through the process and paperwork of reporting fraud.
They feel that the matter is too trivial to report.
Our fraud quiz contained a variety of fairly easy questions designed to test how aware our participants were on a wide range of different frauds, scams and cybercrime.
We firstly asked, how aware of frauds and scams our participants felt they were - 79% answered ‘very’ or ‘fairly’. This probably leads to why 56% of participants said they weren’t worried about falling victim to fraud at all.
However, only 1% of people got every question right.
Here are the results we gained on a range of fraud topics;
Email Scams: We asked three questions regarding very popular ‘phishing’ emails to see if people could identify whether they were scams or not.
65% of people could identify a clear email scam to be a £90 parking ticket.
We also gave an example of where a fraudster has pretended to be a friend of yours asking for help - 23% of participants would have fallen for this one.
The third example was a fake discount voucher for a shopping website, encouraging you to click on a malicious link – this proved to be too tempting for 45% of the participants who may have just opened themselves up to a malware attack.
Read more about how to identify a phishing email
Holiday Scam: Another question asked participants to identify a fake holiday advert. These could be in the form of a leaflet or an online advert. Two out of the four options were scams - only 20% of participants identified both, 71% identified one and 9% couldn’t identify either.
Read more about the types of holiday scams
Phishing Call: A lot of fraudsters use cold calling to defraud you- often pretending to be from a company or organisation that you do business with, like for example your bank. This question asked participants to identity which options could be from a legitimate bank and which were a scam - there were two correct answers. 67% of people identified both correctly, 25% identified one and 8% couldn’t identify either.
Online Dating Scam: Online dating scams are an increasing threat to people who use these popular sites. Fraudsters will often take advantage of their victim’s emotions to help them scam money from them. Luckily, 82% correctly identified the scam that we described.
Read more about online dating scams
Rubber Ducky: A ‘rubber ducky’ is a term used to describe a USB stick which has been previously programmed to either steal information from someone’s computer or to download viruses and malware. Only 27% of people were aware of this term - hopefully this doesn’t mean that 73% of people have been sticking mysterious USB sticks, that they’ve found lying around, into their computers!
Identity Theft: This question asked what precautions you could take to protect yourself from identity theft. There were four options and all of them were correct - only 50% of participants identified this, leaving the other 50% open to the potential threat of having their identity stolen.
Secure Passwords: Passwords provide us with the majority of our online security, so it is important to pick one that is hard to crack! We provided four password options to our participants, but unfortunately only 36% of people managed to identify what a secure password is!
We posted our quiz on several of the main social media sites. In doing this, we received many comments (although they were still just the minority of comments, most were very positive) from people claiming that our quiz was a scam itself, and warned people not to do it.
So why would people think this?
If our quiz was a scam, it would have been taken off these major social media sites reasonably quickly. If it had only been up a couple of days then we can understand the caution, but even after a couple of weeks such comments were still being made.
In addition, our website that hosted the quiz is SSL secure, has a digital certificate for high grade encryption (256-bit), and also has the same Global Sign Extended SSL ‘green bar’ that you will commonly find when banking online.
This reveals that many people can be ignorant towards the topic and don’t take the time to correctly learn the difference between what is a scam and what in fact isn’t.
Find it useful? Please share!
Find it useful? Please share!
Last updated: 23 January 2020 | © KIS Bridging Loans 2024 | Terms & Conditions
