Top Email Fraud Techniques Used by Cyber Criminals

Cybercrime is a criminal activity wherein a single computer, multiple computers, or interconnected computers/devices have been used. A cyberattack may involve the intranet and the internet. Cybercrime can be committed by an individual, group of people, organizations, and even state-sponsored agencies.

According to the Internet Security Threat Report 2017, there’s been a resurgence of malicious email as a favored attack method for cybercriminals. The report showed that 1 in 131 emails sent was malicious, the highest rate in 5 years. Let’s look at ways Cyber Criminals Use Email to Commit Fraud.

Let’s look at ways Cyber Criminals Use Email to Commit Fraud.

• Spamming: Unwanted, bulk emails sent to recipients for some motive such as advertising, stealing personal information, installation of malware, or selling illegal/prohibited items. Often it is called the negative side of email marketing.
• Phishing: Cybercriminals impersonate individuals, organizations, and so on via emails. These fraudulent emails may appear from various government organizations such as the income tax department stating that you have not filed the income tax return on time, so you have to pay the penalty; it may pretend to be from a bank asking to update your KYC details; they send an exciting sale to offer free shopping voucher or cashback offer, or they may send threatening email stating that your email account will be closed if you don’t respond to this email. As you click on the mentioned link in the email, it directs you to a fake website which is a look-alike of a legitimate website. An email related to corona update is a new phishing trend.
• Email bombing: Cybercriminals send a large number of emails in a very short span of time to flood your inbox using automated programs. It results in the bouncing of emails as the email quota exceeds. Due to this, you may miss important communication, which may further result in the hanging of the webserver. Normally, official emails are the target as cybercriminals may have various intentions, such as taking control of your email id and harming the mail server by performing a denial of service (DoS) attack.
• Spoofing: Emails are created with a forged sender address; often, the sender pretends to be someone known to the recipient. In spoofed emails, the sender’s real identity is hidden, and he intends to get the recipient’s financial details either by luring the recipient or by installing malware.

If you want to protect yourself from cyber threats while browsing the internet, watching videos over the Internet, using emails, and using social media apps such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or playing online games, then check out our book “Cybercrime and Preventive Measures”.