The Best Ways to Protect Your Business and Employees From Scams
While we’re all increasingly aware of scams that could target us in our own homes – such as cold calls from con artists trying to trick us into making some dodgy investments – and how to protect against them, often, we’re less aware of scams that could take in staff members in a work setting.
However, workplace scams are on the increase and can cause havoc, costing business owners both time, money, and stress. Luckily, though, there are things that you can put in place to protect employees from being exposed to these cons: and protect your business at the same time.
Below we detail the key ways to guard against the most common workplace scams – and you simply might be surprised at how easy most of these things are to implement.
1. Malware Protection
Protecting against malware attacks is one of the best things to prevent your employees’ devices from being subjected to malware and other malicious online attacks that could compromise your business’s most sensitive data.
Installing high-quality anti-virus or anti-malware software across all the devices your business uses is an effective way to protect against this. As well as device-level protection, you may also want to look at the network and server-level protection to up your organization’s defenses against attack.
Putting a firewall in place is also a reasonable means of providing an additional layer of protection: this acts as a barrier between your business’s IT infrastructure and the internet, thereby preventing any authorized access to your network.
2. Protect Sensitive Messages
Some of your employees may need to send sensitive emails, and it’s essential to ensure that these can’t be hacked or intercepted. Consider ensuring that your staff members have access to email signing certificate tools, enabling them to exchange digitally signed and encrypted messages to other users with the same security tools.
If you’re wondering, ‘how can I check my email for sensitive messages?’ and read them safely, knowing that only those with specific access can also read the message, this is the solution for you and your employees.
Sending emails with signing certificates means not only that the recipient alone can access it but also provides protection both when the email is en route to the sender and once it’s arrived at its destination server.
3. Stress the Importance of Strong Passwords
It’s worth educating your workforce on the cruciality of strong passwords. This will protect not just them from fraud and scams but your business, too. Passwords should not include whole words or be easy to guess and should never be used across multiple platforms and accounts.
Using a password generator is a great way to stay safe: the mix of random numbers, letters, and special characters make for a password that’s extremely difficult to hack. As an employee, using two-factor authentication is also an excellent way to keep your staff and business safe from unauthorized individuals trying to access the system.
4. Anti-Phishing Measures
Phishing attacks are on the rise indeed: these attacks involve a cybercriminal sending an unsolicited email that appears to arrive from a natural source, usually with a link to another website that also appears authentic. This website, however, is likely to be a clone – entering your details, or those of your business, including payment or financial details, will result in this information being compromised: meaning the scammer may be able to raid all the associated bank accounts.
There are several ways to protect your employees from falling foul of a phishing attack. Firstly, making the dangers clear is essential; ask that team members never click on a link in an unsolicited email or respond to it.
For extra peace of mind, you may also want to deploy anti-phishing software for your company, which will prevent the vast majority of these malicious messages from getting through in the first place.
5. Keeping Social Media Accounts Safe
It’s also a good suggestion to explain your employees know how important it is to keep their social media accounts secure at home and at work. This can be done by checking the privacy and security settings regularly.
For team members responsible for updating and posting to your business’s social media account, being evident in the policy regarding who can post, share, and comment on your company’s platform is vital.
6. Create a Fraud Policy
Finally, writing a written fraud policy effectively provides a protective strategy for all employees. Most frauds start small and develop over time. On average, if an employee is committing fraud, it takes about eighteen months to uncover this – which can devastate your business and the other employees within it.
The policy should clearly define what fraud is and the actions that will be taken against anyone in the organization that is found to be guilty of it. It should also include how a fraud investigation would be carried out. Formal training for all staff should then be arranged regarding this policy.
How To Report a Scammer
Let your family and online friends know about this article on your social media platforms. You can also officially report criminals and any other suspicious activity to the Federal Trade Commission using this link:
How To Protect Yourself More
If you want to be the first to find out the most notorious scams every week, feel free to subscribe to the Scam Detector newsletter here. You’ll receive periodic emails – we promise not to spam.
Meanwhile, educate yourself with some other Amazon fraud-related articles right under this paragraph, so that you know how to stay safe online. Last but not least, use the comments section below to expose other scammers.
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