I am with MCE Insurance. Yesterday I received a text telling me that I had a missed payment and had been charged an additional fee for this. A link was provided to a number to call to pay what was owed. It was a good text as it was 1. Spoofed so that it appeared on the end of legitimate texts that I have received from MCE. 2. The linked number was very similar to the legitimate numbers used by MCE or may indeed have been one they do use that had also been spoofed. It was clearly a phishing attempt as I do not make payments of the amount specified, my account with MCE is not in arrears and the spacing / punctuation of the text wasn’t quite right. I rang MCE (who confirmed there was no issue with my insurance) and the customer services agent also told me that he had spoken to someone yesterday who had had a similar text. I have emailed them with a screenshot of the text and also reported to NCSC phishing reporting service. Just wanted to warn people as it is a pretty good attempt and I can imagine people busy and distracted or a bit less aware falling into the scammer’s trap. The screenshot shows two legitimate texts and the phishing attempt on the end.
A sober reminder that scams are everywhere, I only ever pay for all my insurance in one payment to avoid these scams, once they get your details a bank account can be cleaned out in seconds, very recently a legitimate but in my view a rather nasty organisation hacked the data base of a company and posted all the customers details on the "Dark Web", those responsible have been tracked down by specialist Police Officers and will at some point be dealt with by way of Court, however the damage has been done. A good anti virus that has dark web monitoring will record and let you know if any information is out there.
I didn’t know that MCE were still in business. They are only 10 miles up the road from me at Wellingborough and 01933 is the area code.
Norton 360 is one of those anti virus packages that will search the dark web. But you have to give it the information you want it to search for. I found that the search categories were limited in the number of variants you could ask to be searched for e.g. email addresses etc which may mean that you will need to prioritise the information that you need to be searched for.
