UK’s National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) has published new guidance for organizations to follow when communicating with customers via SMS or phone calls.
The goal of the new guidelines is to make it harder for scammers to trick the public and lead users to phishing sites.
This action comes in response to an alarming rise in scams that spoof popular brands, with fake parcel deliveries being the dominant theme.
The NCSC urges businesses to do their part in protecting consumers and fighting the rising threat of scams, and the main way to achieve this is by making legitimate and fraudulent communications easier to discern.
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When organizations use SMS to communicate with an audience, the NCSC recommends that they use the following guidelines to assure recipients that a text is legitimate:
Spoofing the phone numbers of legitimate entities is now fairly easy for criminals, so the calling number itself doesn’t constitute a guarantee of safety in communications.
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To help tackle this problem, businesses are advised to follow these guidelines when calling customers:
Even though the above measures will help in tackling scams, smishing (SMS phishing), and fraudulent phone calls, the consumers need to do their part too by keeping the following in mind:
In general, if something feels wrong when speaking to someone, ask for their name and hang up. Then, independently call the organization using the number you’ll find on their website and request to speak with the agent who contacted you.
Do not, under any circumstance, give away sensitive personal information on calls that you didn’t initiate.