How To Spot Common Phishing and Scam Attempts

In today’s ever-changing digital age, staying safe online is of utmost importance. Phishing attacks and scams are becoming increasingly sophisticated, making it important for individuals to remain educated on newer tactics in order to protect themselves.

Additionally, as Switch grows and becomes more popular, Switch and our users will become a bigger target to these threats. While we will try to report and identify these scams when we can, we have compiled some recent fraudulent attempts we have seen in order for you to be aware and stay vigilant and educated.

1) Phishing Attempts

Phishing emails are one of the most prevalent forms of cyber attacks. These fraudulent emails are designed to trick you into revealing sensitive information or downloading malicious attachments.

Some common ways to spot these emails are:

• Urgency and threats. Phishing emails often create a sense of urgency or use threats to prompt immediate action. They may claim that your account is compromised or that you need to update your information urgently or you may lose access to your account.

Below is an example of a recent attempt received by one of our employees where you can see the sense of urgency of a same day deadline:

• Quality of the Email.   Pay attention to the quality of the email including grammar and spelling mistakes as well as variations to a logo or the common structure and layout of an email that you may be used to seeing from an organization.

Creating duplicate pages is a common tactic on social media.   A scammer will try to create a clone page of a trusted company’s page and use that to get you to click on their link, where they will then attempt to trick you into giving them your account information.

There was a recent scam attempt reaching out to our Facebook followers trying to pretend to be us with a fake Facebook page and using a link with “switchrewardcard” as the subdomain instead of the domain.

Please see the graphic to learn the difference between a Subdomain Web Address and a Domain Web Address. Always check the Domain to make sure you are going to your intended destination.

In the above example the Domain Name is actually tokens-app.com as web browsers read web addresses from right to left. By using switchrewardcard as a subdomain in front of their domain they are trying to trick you into clicking on the link and thinking you are at an official Switch page.

Other ways to spot fake social media pages are:

• Age of Account (Is it a Newer Account with Little Posting History?)

• Low Follower Count

3) Password Safety

A few quick reminders on password safety:

• Switch Customer Support will NEVER ask you for your passwords including your Seed Recovery Phrase.

• Don’t use the same password as your Account Login Password and your Encryption Password (also known as Trading Password).

• Make your passwords more complex by interchanging numbers for letters such as “P@ssw0rd” instead of “Password”. (This is just an example and please don’t user password as your password.)

4) Staying Up to Date

As technology advances, scammers will also use technology to innovate the way they do things.

• One new tactic is using AI and other technology to clone someone’s voice. With this technology a scammer could use the voice of someone you know (by finding their voice on YouTube or other social media platforms and cloning it) to call you and using their voice try to scam you out of money or information. Here’s a recent NPR article that goes into more detail on this.

This list is in no way comprehensive but meant to help as a resource to stay up to date. If you come across or receive anything claiming to be about or from Switch Reward Card that you think is suspicious, please don’t click on it and reach out to our Support Team for confirmation. They can be reached via [email protected]

More additional information on crypto safety, please visit our previous blog on the topic.
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