As the Christmas holiday season approaches, Google has alerted Gmail users about five key scams and spams. The users have also been advised to avoid gift card and other giveaway frauds, charity-related scams, demographic targeting scams, subscription renewal frauds, and crypto scams.
In its recent blog post, Google also said that it has protected its users from around 15 billion daily unwanted messages, apart from blocking over 99.9% of spam, phishing, and malware attempts.
Generally, gift card and giveaway frauds hit their peak during the festivities. Scammers pretend to be a recognized contact and attempt to fool victims into buying a gift card for them. They will even present lucrative ‘offers’ such as free presents in exchange for the victim’s credit card number.
In Charity-related and phishing scams, even the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) which are being run on donations get affected as well. Google has asked its Gmail users to keep an eye on identity-based malicious emails, which may impersonate local parent-teacher association (PTA) board members or target certain age groups.
As per the tech giant, scams involving membership renewal might create fake antivirus services, in order to attract potential victims with the promise of increased security.
The Gmail users have been asked to check the senders’ mail ids and double-check all the other information mentioned in the mail as well, to ensure that the mail has come from a genuine source.
The tech giant meanwhile is going to implement a performance improvement plan for its staffers and if the reports are to be believed, then some 10,000 employees will be let go.
Employees receiving low-performance ratings will be let go. The new review mechanism will also play a key role, in terms of giving out incentives and performance awards.