While counting the financial losses your UK business suffers from fraud, think about its impact on vulnerable consumer’s mental welfare; perhaps, this will move you to act faster. Think about how it would feel to pay for services you never receive, how it feels to watch your bank account wiped, strange withdrawal notifications bleeping your device, etc. These and many more can have detrimental consequences on consumers.
While internet fraud cripples your finance and reputation, a vulnerable person has been mentally crippled. And if they cannot immediately get over it permanently, it can extend to PTSD. Even insignificant losses to scammers can be mentally devastating, especially on consumers with mental health problems.
How Fraudsters Victimise Customers
The UK’s annual fraud cost is an estimated £137 billion in 2021, and internet fraudsters could be racking a massive £375m off the UK economy each day. Their target? The familiar internet users, especially in this post-pandemic period, which is seeing a surge in online transactions. Fortunately, brands aggressively protecting their customers through solutions like domain monitoring are not receiving much of the impact, if any.
The UK lockdown accelerated online scams, and with the e-commerce surge, many fraudsters leveraged uninformed people to cash in on them. This also means a dwindling business reputation and questions to answer.
Unfortunately, internet scammers are getting away with their activities. And because of this, vulnerable people become easy targets, leaving them in traumatic conditions amidst COVID impact and limiting a new normal way of life.
What are fraudsters doing? It is easy: they replicate your brand, beginning with registering domains that are phonetically and visually similar to your domain name. This process is known as ‘typosquatting’.
They will further sophisticated employ measures to collect your customers’ contact information, including their email addresses and phone number. If there is an existing credential breach on your website, scammers can also buy a list of your customers’ information from the dark web to use them for phishing, pharming, etc.
Scammers can also smish, pharm or phish. Here, a scammer sends unsolicited messages containing malicious URLs to the contact information they obtained earlier. When people, especially the vulnerable, follow the link, they land on a fake website that will steal personal information, including credit and debit card details.
Fraudsters’ Hard Web Strike: Vulnerable UK Customers’ Mental Health Situation
At least 40 percent of victims of internet scams have felt stressed. As mentioned earlier, it can be a traumatic experience irrespective of the amount of money involved. It suffices to say that the government is trying, at least to their best, but it is all about businesses who understand their consumers better.
The strike gets even stiffer by the day, and with no-so-effective government policies, the vulnerable are having to receive an all-round hit.
A person’s mental illness is directly proportional to the scale of the scam they have experienced. Vulnerable consumers describe the effect as soul-destroying and devastating, leading to sadness, distress, stress, and even anger. The sudden shock sends electrifying waves through your vulnerable customers’ veins, who might cuss and resolve never to associate with anything that carries your brand name.
In extreme cases, vulnerable people think suicide, and you are somehow responsible for these mental health impacts since they trusted the scammer to be your brand. Out of worry and rage from the event of the fraud, the vulnerable can develop self-blame and lose self-confidence.
The prolonged feelings can be severely destructive on the older person’s life, whose life thereafter might be influenced by the experience even if it is addressed.
Apart from the emotional impact, stress can affect a vulnerable senior’s physical health, especially if they have already-existing conditions. It can result in bodily pains, lower subjective health, and poor sleep. Indeed, protecting vulnerable people’s mental welfare would also mean protecting their physical health.
Best Practices to Protect Vulnerable Consumers Mental Welfare
The elderley are more likely to lose personal data or money to internet fraudsters than the rest of the population. This is enough reason to act faster than ever before the vulnerable fall for the daily-sophisticating techniques of scammers.
If you must act, how should you act to protect the mental welfare of your vulnerable customers?
- Related top-level domain registration. Some domain names are phonetically and visually similar to yours. You can begin by registering the closest domain name in appearance and in pronunciation so that scammers are left with a not-so-similar domain name to register.
- Risk assessment. Brand impersonation risk assessment can put you on the right course towards discovering the angles you must reconstruct to resolve a problem such as typosquatting that results in phishing.
- Trademarking. You can trademark your brand, not just boosting customer trust but also justify takedown requests.
- Invest in domain monitoring. While you have the above strategies in place, you want a set of algorithms that efficiently monitor and report registered domain names similar to yours. You are then able to follow up on such domains and request takedowns before they become phishing sites.
- Keep the customer informed. Ensure to keep your customers informed at all times. Update them with your new security policies to help them avoid/ignore scamming campaigns.
A domain monitoring solution is all you need to curb threats before they escalate. If you must act, act earlier, at least within this period, before your customers become fraud victims. Start now to protect the brand you have successfully grown over the years.