Fraudulent non-profits claiming to support Ukraine detected by cyber security company

Hackers and online fraudsters are using fake non-profit domains in support of Ukraine to target your wallet, according to the international cyber security company Checkpoint.

Robert Falzon says Checkpoint has seen a rise in cyber attacks once the Russia-Ukraine invasion began in a “far more focused approach.”

“They’re sending text messages to folks … saying, ‘please help and donate’ and ‘help us now.’ They were playing on your emotions … They’re trying to get you to have an emotional response and quickly click on that [link] and give them the money.”

This fraud trend is a typical trick and will look safe because they copy the legit organizations. However, Falzon says a few tell-tale signs help you spot fraud, like the site domains that could be off by a letter or have extra characters.

However, checking the URL before you click will only get you so far since it is not an option when these fraudsters reach out over social media and instant messenger services.

“Because many people get their news asymmetrically now, they’re getting it from all sorts of different sources, and not all of them are necessarily as truthful as others. So they’re falling victim to these things because there might be a link presented to them or some sort of URL they could click on. And they might not understand whatsoever what that link is going to.

“Now in your email, you have a little bit more control, because you could you generally see the entire URL.”

So Falzon says a simple way not to fall victim to these scams is not to click on unsolicited links and never open any online document received from an unknown source.

“One of the most successful … scams are the ones that relate to shipping companies. They might say, ‘you have an invoice to receive your shipment … So when you click on that URL, and you download the invoice and you open it, unfortunately, it’s a piece of malware. And what many folks don’t realize is just a simple PDF actually has the ability to have encoding with it. So it has code that can execute when you open and just view it. The same with maybe a Word file or an Excel spreadsheet.”

The best advice Falzon has is to set up anti-virus protection devices.

“Also make sure that you’re not using the same credentials for all the different sites you log into, have strong passwords, change them frequently,” he adds.

And if you want to make donations, always go the organizations website directly.