In a world where everybody is bombarded with fraudulent emails and spam calls, practically on a daily basis, it is important to minimize your exposure to these security threats. For example, just by answering the phone and saying a few words such as “Hello? No, I’m not interested”, using the sound of your voice and any accent, criminals may be able to determine your ethnicity, the language you speak, your approximate age, gender and the time of day you may be available to answer the phone. This information and other big data may be gathered and sold on an open market or they may use it themselves to try further attacks to gather even more personal information about you.
Your personal and sensitive data can be used in identity theft schemes to open new credit card accounts, get loans or mortgages or buy expensive items under your name. A fraudster may even try to impersonate you using the information they have to sell or rent out your home without your knowledge! It’s really pretty scary if you think about it.
Protecting your own information
So, how do we protect ourselves from these professional thieves in a digital world? Well, it’s important to be vigilant and there are several simple things you can do to protect yourself.
1) For emails, add email addresses of any of your personal contacts and/or mailing lists from people and companies you actually do business with to your “Saved Contacts”. This way, you may be able to easily filter out emails coming in from other sources which are more likely to be phishing for your information. If you tend to click on any emails that may, at first glance, look like it’s from someone or a company you may know, you should always check the email address of the “sender” to see if it looks legitimate before even thinking about reading through the email or clicking any links.
2) For phone calls, if it’s not a phone number you recognize, don’t answer. If it’s someone that you actually know or needs to reach you, they’ll likely leave you a voicemail or try to call you again. A lot of spammers or robo-dialers may call you once, and then move on to the next target if you don’t answer. Now, if someone leaves you a voice message claiming that they are from a certain company, always check the company’s website to find their official phone number to call back to verify that they are indeed trying to reach you and that the phone number given to you in the voice message is actually an official internal number they use, before thinking about giving any information out.
3) Don’t forget that people may also try to scam you at your front door as well, so do keep in mind that it may actually be illegal for door-to-door sales of many different products and services in our province (of Ontario). It’s also quite easy to have custom t-shirts printed to mimic uniforms of reputable companies and organizations so the person at your house might not be who they say they are. Personally, I wouldn’t recommending giving out any personal or financial information to a stranger at your door, because you’ll probably never see them again or be able to verify what else they may be doing with your information.
Identifying potential scams is the first step in protecting your personal information. There are however, different services that can help reduce or block unwanted calls or some that even offer protection if you accidentally clicked on an unsafe website or link.
$0 Call Control
To help you get a better understanding, let’s start by talking about something that is FREE. Yes, there is a service that is provided some mobile phone service providers that is free and it’s called Call Control. What is Call Control and how does it work you might ask? The $0 Call Control feature that is offered by TELUS and Koodo helps reduce spam calls by filtering many robo-dialers. First, you can turn the feature ON or OFF using the Self-Serve portal in the Features and Add-ons section. If you’d like, you can also manage an allow-list of up to 25 phone numbers there as well, so people calling you from those specific phone numbers won’t be filtered.
For everybody else calling you, we’ll hear an automated message telling us that “this user has Call Control. To be connected, please press …” and it’ll give us a random generated number to press on our dial pad. IF we press the right button, then we will be connected and your phone will ring. For computers and robo-dialers that may not understand the instructions or be able to press the right button, those calls will be filtered and your phone will not ring at all! Now that I have successfully connected, I’ll automatically be in your Recent 25 Calls list so if I call you again using the same phone number, I won’t need to re-authenticate again, so for the people who connect with you regularly, even if you don’t bother maintain an allow-list, it shouldn’t change things much after they authenticate once.
If you want to reduce unwanted spam calls, remember to ask your own service provider for Call Control or switch over to TELUS or Koodo to get it for FREE!
TELUS Online Security
Aside from the free feature we just talked about, there’s also paid subscription services that are much more comprehensive which may help keep your devices, credentials, accounts and identity safe. Let’s start by going over some features to keep your personal information private.
Device Security
For the Ultimate TELUS Online Security plan, everything that we’re going to be talking about will be included, but there are more basic options available that are a little less expensive as well. OK, the first line of defense starts with protecting your devices with device security and anti-virus. You can have up to 20 devices such as computers, tablets and mobile phones protected with one plan. Not only will you get protection against hackers and viruses, the protection app will actually be able to give you warnings and bounce you out from accessing unsafe websites. That means that even though, I’m careful with avoiding and also deleting spam emails, on days that I drop my phone and click a link by accident, or when I’m half asleep and press a wrong button, I won’t have to worry about being hacked by malicious websites or software.
With Wi-Fi available in many places, device security also means that the app will automatically scan your Wi-Fi connection to see if it is safe. If the app thinks that your home Wi-Fi isn’t secure, it may tell you that the password may need to be updated with a longer password or more secure authenticate method. If it determines that the connection you are using may be possibly hacked or unsecure, it can automatically help you turn on a secure VPN so that any data traffic will be encrypted so hackers won’t be able to steal your information such as your banking details or the credit cards you’re using for online shopping.
Password Manager
Device security that is automatic is a great line of protection, but what about the passwords you are using? Is every single password you use online a unique one that is completely different from every other website you use? A typical person will likely have about 50-200 logins for anything ranging from streaming services you use to watch movies and shows, to social media platforms you browse regularly, to apps and communication tools you may use yourself or for work. If the passwords are truly unique for every single one of them most people would have a hard time remembering all of those complex passwords to keep everything secure.
That’s where a Password Manager can come in to help you and it’s included in ALL of the TELUS Online Security packages. Most of my passwords are now 64 characters long (or the longest the individual app/website allows), mixed with letters, numbers and symbols. Nobody can guess any of my passwords and according to my Password Manager, it’ll take “more than the age of the universe” to crack any one of them.
The great thing about it is that I don’t even need to know those passwords as the password manager not only helps me remember all my passwords, but it’ll also help me fill it in when I need it using authentication of my fingerprint or face ID (depending on what device I’m using). Of course, when setting it up the first time, you’ll want to set up ONE long and complicated password to use to log in to the password manager. This is a password that you should write down and safely store away (perhaps in a safety deposit box if you have one or a personal safe). You won’t need to use this one on a regular basis, but it’ll be important when you’re logging in on a new device.
Once you have secured the password manager, you’ll want to find a day that you have lots of time to log in to every website you use and change each and every one of those passwords to a complex version that the password manager can help you generate. Don’t forget to click the save button to save them to the password manager so you don’t get locked out of your accounts!
24/7 Monitoring – Dark Web,
Social Media & Credit Monitoring
Every now and then you may hear on the news that some big corporation or website got hacked and accounts may have been compromised. Dark web monitoring that’s 24/7 will continuously scan the web for your personal information such as email accounts, your ID such as Social Insurance Number (SIN), your driver’s license, your credit cards and so on, so if anything is leaked, you’ll be able to find out and have it dealt with quickly.
Talking about monitoring, something that’s a bit newer is Social Media Monitoring. As many of you probably have lots of friends, family and followers connected to your social media accounts, it’s important to keep your accounts safe, because what you send out or post might affect the lives of many other people. If someone hacks in to any of your accounts to send out private messages they may to try to victimize your personal contacts by asking them to send money to “save” or “help” you. Some may even post messages with malicious links or websites to your account, but you’ll be able find out quickly so that you can take action to re-secure your accounts and warn people telling them that your account may have been previously hacked to minimize any potential damages or losses.
Lost/Stolen Wallet Assistance
Talking about losses, not only can you get bank, credit card and investment account activity alerts so you can easily tell if anything looks unusual, there’s even full service lost or stolen wallet assistance as well! If you ever lose your wallet and have activated this service, you won’t have to spend hours waiting on hold or calling the banks for each and every card you own. You’ll be able to make one call, give authorization and our team of experts will help you get replacement ID and cards for all of them. I don’t even want to think about the frustration and headaches I’d have if I had to deal with it myself, so let the experts take care of it for you.
Identity Theft Protection & Restoration
Have you ever thought about when you might actually find out if you’ve been a victim of identity theft before? Well, as we mentioned earlier, if you lose your wallet and or your information has been compromised, professional criminals may be able to create fake ID and try to open new accounts for phones or credit cards, get bank loans or mortgages or buy cars all under your name. If you’re not monitoring your credit profile on a regular basis, you may not even know that any new account has been opened. Unless you’re applying for a loan or mortgage yourself, the bank won’t be calling to tell you that you’re not credit worthy either.
Imagine that you’re looking to get a new car, or better yet, a new house. So you’re shopping around for your first house and you’re looking at so many places to try to find the right one. In the crazy market today, you might even have been submitting offers for months and months already, trying to land a deal for a place to call your own. Well, maybe six months later, you find a seller that accepts your offer and you’re super happy that you finally did it. With all the time that’s past, you might be close to your move out date of your current one too, so aren’t you glad that you have a signed offer? … That is until you bring the offer to the bank and they tell you “no, we cannot approve you for a loan”.
What?! Thinking out loud, I’ve always paid all my bills on time and don’t owe anybody money, what do you mean NO? That’ll actually just be the tip of the iceberg. To get things sorted out, reporting to the police, talking to financial experts, lawyers, banks, and so on, is a lot of work. The worse part is that when we meet people who didn’t have a protection plan, they often tell us about all the obstacles that they had to go through and that it took them 2-5 years to clear their name on their own. TWO to FIVE YEARS… what are you going to do and where are you going to live during that time?? Unfortunately, it’s usually situations like this that you find out your identity was once stolen.
Guess what, with TELUS Online Security there’s credit monitoring alerts available from both Equifax and TransUnion AND daily on-demand reporting, as well as up to $1 million in identity theft reimbursement coverage, PLUS FULL-SERVICE identity restoration by an industry expert. With the insurance of up to $1 million dollars, you can bet that it’ll be much easier and much faster to negotiate with banks or creditors to have your name restored quickly and someone else will do all that work for you. Phew! Wouldn’t that be a relief?
Don’t be a victim!
Now that you know a little bit more about how to recognize scammers, reduce unwanted calls and prevent unauthorized access to your accounts, you may want to dig deeper to learn even more. On our other post, we have included some of the information we’ve discussed with you today, but also materials and links from official government sources that you can trust. If you feel like some light reading, don’t forget to visit the iqmobile.ca/faq for more articles and useful information.
