The dangers of phishing sites

by Andrew Summers Biochemistry Teacher

Ive always considered myself pretty shrewd and able to make good judgements when it comes to not being scammed when online.

However I was almost caught out a few weeks ago when I was trying to log into one of my accounts. It was a bitcoin account and because it contained some bitcoin I had 2FA enabled on it in the form of a dongle usb which I need to use to get into my account.

Anyway I googled the website trezor.io and up it popped in the search results. I tried to log in but unusually it was asking for my seed. A seed is a string of words that you must keep secure in case you lose your dongle.

Now its never asked me for this before but as I was about to enter the text I took one more look at the url. To my amazement it was treczor.io and not trezor.io.

I instantly thought I better check further before I enter any info so I contacted the companies facebook page and they did indeed confirm it was a phishing site. The worrying thing about it though is that it came top of the search results in the form of a paid google ad.

The real trezor company then said I should bookmark their page and stop using google to find them. Which I did.

Phishing not only happens in finance it can happen in a whole host of other websites. There was a reliable pharmacy which sold growth hormone which fell foul of a phishing site. It was called the 5kits Scam. A proper HGH website is iron man

Because it was a unique name another website set up with a similar name and started targeting their returning customers by ranking higher up googles' search results.

Its best to be always careful what you are clicking on and which website you are putting your username and password into. If the phishers get hold of it they can lock you out of your account simply by changing your password and emptying your account.

If you use the same password and username for other accounts they will empty those to. The moral of this story is ALWAYS CHECK THE URL.