Black Friday: Up to 20 percent more spam

Philadelphia, PA. The email provider mail.com is registering an increase in spam and phishing attacks of around 20 percent during the Black Friday week. Pre-Black Friday sale days, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are high season for bargain hunters on the internet. Shoppers let their guard down as they respond quickly to low-price offers. Online criminals take unscrupulous advantage of this: Particularly frequent scams are parcel service phishing attempts and fake vouchers.

"Spam and phishing work especially well when the victims are under pressure. If you receive an email with an exceptionally good offer, you might not look too closely or become careless. Mistakes can easily be made, or you can fall for a trick that you normally would have recognized if you’d had more time to think about it," warns Arne Allisat, head of the mail.com mail security team.

Two scam methods are particularly popular this year: parcel service phishing and voucher scams. In the parcel service method, victims receive a phishing email that looks confusingly similar to a real notification from USPS or FedEx. In it, there is a link with a request for payment to allegedly settle small shipping fees amounting to a few dollars. This means the attackers not only receive the money, but also can grab the access data for their victims' online banking or PayPal accounts at the same time.

The second attack method is fake shopping vouchers. Here, it is suggested that you can get a particularly high discount or credit at a major shopping platform such as Amazon, Walmart, or Target. All you have to do is register via a link in the email. The link then leads to the scammers’ fake website, which at first glance cannot be distinguished from the real shopping platform. If the user logs on to this website, their access data is sent directly to the scammers – who can then make purchases on someone else's account.

"The main thing, especially now in the bargain-shopping season, is to always think twice before you click. No deal can be so cheap or exclusive that you should put your digital identity at risk for it,” adds Allisat. “And to protect yourself from having your email account taken over in a phishing attack, you should activate two-factor authentication wherever possible. Then even if the password is stolen, no one can get into the account without the second factor. This protection is especially important for email accounts."

About mail.com

mail.com is one of the top free email portals in the United States, with its data center located in Lenexa, Kansas. The company offers its consumer and business users an unparalleled selection of more than 200 supplier-neutral email addresses related to a broad variety of topics like business, geographic location and personal interests. mail.com also provides online office solutions and cloud applications, and presents international news covering a broad spectrum of content categories. Options such as mobile apps, browser add-ons and mail collector make it easy for users to access and manage their email accounts. With state-of-the-art internet security and careful adherence to customer privacy requirements, mail.com strives for optimum performance. mail.com is a member of United Internet, Europe’s leading internet specialist.

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