Think before you email
The Investment Association is warning of 'heightened criminal activity' from coronavirus scammers during lockdown.
In a statement, the IA said "new and increased financial criminal activity has been identified by investment managers and national authorities", with scammers "attempting to use the pandemic to convince savers and investors to withdraw money from their investments".
Investment Association warns of 'heightened criminal activity' from coronavirus scammers
The FCA has also issued warnings this month on the growing cyber risks posed by coronavirus, which has initiated "new types of scam activity".
The FCA states that scammers may contact your clients by email, post or a phone call and claim to be from the FCA or use the name of an employee, to give the impression that the communication is genuine.
The FCA sends emails from addresses ending in @fca.org.uk and @fcanewsletters.org.uk but highlights that fraudsters can ‘clone’ these email addresses to make their emails seem genuine.
The lockdown has seen a massive increase in email attacks as well as growing examples of scammers using techniques such as phishing and "smishing", in addition to more extreme and "aggressive" tactics such as posing as a police officer, in an effort to defraud clients.
Isn't it time you secured your communications?
Any communication that relies on email is fundamentally flawed and the problems associated with it are not going away.
Ray Tomlinson invented and developed email in 1971. It's been one of the most brilliant inventions, changing everyone's lives (mostly for the better) and allowing billions of people to communicate quickly and easily.
Electronic communication has removed the need for the post in almost all situations especially given the move to adopt e-signatures by organisations during lockdown.
Email has been an enabler of great business expansion however its days as a business tool are numbered.
We get too much and don't trust it.
We get too many emails, we ignore most of them and we've learnt not to trust any of them. If you send a document via email you are lucky if your client reads it.
Send your client an email and how do you know they've seen it alongside the other hundreds of emails they receive and how can you be sure it hasn't just gone into their spam folder?
Worse still send your client an email with a clink this link to view and sign a document and even if they read it, they're too scared to click on the link.
Secure email Is not the answer.
Sending your client financial information by secure email is not the answer nor is password protecting documents. Secure emails seem like a phishing attempt and your client finds them too complicated to use and can't remember their login details.
Once your client has eventually got to the information you've sent them, they will store these on their computer unencrypted to make sure they've got a record of it and if they fall foul of a scammer all their financial information is available and you could well have been the original source of the breach.
Businesses need a better form of communication which both they and their clients can rely upon and which keeps their important information safe and secure.
This means it must be kept away from email altogether and ensure that no financial data is stored on your clients' computers, tablets and phones.
At moneyinfo, we can implement you a secure portal to communicate with your clients and share and sign paperwork. It provides a shared audit trail of all your client communications with nothing stored on your client's devices.
We've designed it to be as easy to use as WhatsApp and your clients can communicate with you on their smartphones, tablets and PCs, whatever's convenient to them.
It can speed up onboarding, client reviews and rebalancing from days to minutes leaving you both secure and more efficient.
What’s more, we can have you up and running in days.
Give us a call or send us an email - (yes - we can see the irony!) and we'll show you just how easy it is to secure your communications.
Sim Sangha
Business Development Director
moneyinfo limited
Book a 1-2-1 demo here.
03303 600 300
