We’re pleased to report that the websites those texts tried to get you to click on have been taken down. The aim is the same, however: they want you to focus on the first part of the website address, and in both cases they’ve aped the formatting of the genuine text from the government.
In the second example, the scammer hasn’t bothered with a subdomain, but has simply bought the website address.
#Fake nhs letter template full#
Here, the scammer has created uk-covid-19 as a subdomain of to create the URL, hoping that the person receiving the text will focus on the first part of the address and not notice the full domain name. This is a way of organising websites to help people navigate to the right place, and you can create as many subdomains as you like on a domain you own.įor example, and are both subdomains of the .uk domain. In the first example above, the scammers have used a subdomain. This is where it gets a bit technical, but with some practice, you can become quite adept at spotting and avoiding phishing and smishing attempts that perhaps aren’t immediately obvious. And as with all phishing attempts to trick you into handing over your details to the scammers, the way to tell if a link is a scam is to look at the end of the URL. So it’s more important than ever to pay close attention to a link sent to you in a text or email. That caused security experts some dismay, as the advice given to organisations is not to include links in texts and emails precisely because scammers often put links to their phishing websites in texts. The real text started with capital letters and included a link to the government’s own coronavirus website.Īs a reminder, here is the genuine text we all received from the government. These examples both mimic the genuine text we were all sent at the end of March. In both of these, at first glance they look as if they might be legitimate: they both want you to focus on the part of the url that says which looks as if it might come from the government.īefore we go any further, note that genuine texts from the government come from gov.uk and the government’s own coronavirus website is. So what should you look out for? The same principles apply to SMS messages as to emails – look at the URL they want you to tap through to.
#Fake nhs letter template torrent#
The same scammers are still out there, hoping to cash in as we navigate our way through the torrent of information and advice from official bodies, but now they’re sending out text messages designed to look like genuine texts from the NHS and the government.
‘Smishing’ is another form of phishing that employs the same techniques, but this time through a text message to your phone. These are often designed to look exactly like communication from someone you trust – your bank, an online payment provider like Paypal, or even the UK government.įrom emails that arrive in our inboxes claiming to offer tax refunds, to those imploring us to ‘verify’ our account details and announcing that a Nigerian prince would like to park hundreds of millions of dollars in our bank accounts, the threats are wide and varied, and now they have evolved. You’re probably familiar with typical phishing threats – legitimate looking emails that are designed to tempt you into divulging sensitive information, such as your bank account details, usernames or passwords. What are ‘phishing’ and ‘smishing’ threats?