Scam alert: Why you should think twice about leaving personal details at office receptions

The personal details you enter into notes books at reception areas of institutions may come back to haunt you.

This is because cyber criminals are harvesting information from such platforms to scam people, a Cyber Security Analyst with the e-Crime Bureau, Mr Joseph Quaye, is warning.

He says the fraudsters go to the reception desks of institutions with the knowledge that the organisations collect visitors’ personal information such as phone numbers, emails and even signatures.

“They pretend they are there to look for people and secretly take pictures of notebooks containing those details which they use for illegal activities, including hacking at later dates,” he told The Ghana Report.

Phishing

The most common use of this data to bait unsuspecting members of the public is Phishing.

Phishing is a cybercrime in which a target or targets are contacted by email, telephone or text message by someone posing as a legitimate institution to lure individuals into providing sensitive data such as personally identifiable information, banking, credit card details, and passwords.

The information is then used to access important accounts and can result in identity theft and financial loss.

Mr Quaye said those emails were carefully crafted to look nearly identical to the types of correspondence that were sent out by actual banks. Skilled phishers can replicate the logos, layouts and general tone of such emails to uncanny degrees.
Fictitious emails

Mr Quaye, therefore, urged the public to be extremely cautious about opening email attachments, particularly when even emails of persons known to them could be compromised.

He also urged institutions to invest in digital information capturing systems in order not to compromise data they collect from the public.

Per The Ghana Report‘s observations, offices of the United Nations systems and institutions in the One Airport Square Building at the Airport City in Ghana have ditched note books for digital data captuting systems.