Network Wizkid

It seems as though malicious actors are back out in force, attempting to scam unsuspecting victims by sending emails which appear to be from the TV licensing company. Now, while these emails might be flagged as spam automatically by your email provider, the email may still appear on a mobile device. This means that people can still fall victim to the phishing email if opened and therefore, I feel as though this is worth covering so that you know what to look out for.

So, what does the TV license phishing email look like?

Here is what the email looks like:

Now, while it may not be obvious to some from the initial outset that this email is in fact NOT from the TV Licensing company, there are several indications that suggest this email is not legitimate. Here are a few things that you should be looking out for:

• Spelling mistakes
• Grammatical errors
• Inconsistent spacing
• License number
• Expiry date

You should also check the email address of the sender as it should reflect a domain that is from the TV Licensing company, for example, @tvlicensing/co.uk. In the phishing email that was sent to me to analyse, the senders email address was: joe********@optonline.net (actual email address omitted) but as you can see, the email domain is not that of the TV licensing company.

The TV licensing company have a nice FAQs page here on some more things to look out for.

What are the scammers trying to achieve?

The email has been crafted to create a sense of urgency by having the recipient believe that their TV license has ended conveniently on the day that the email has been received. The scammers hope that by creating this sense of urgency, the recipient will click the link contain within the email to ‘pay’ and renew their TV license.

Thankfully, if you do click the link, you should be protected depending on the web browser you’ve used as the link has been reported and is now flagged as malicious as shown below.

Should your web browser fail to protect you if you’ve clicked on the link. You should NOT proceed with entering any of the requested information. Check the website link, it should give it away and confirm that you are not on a TV licensing website.

Reporting TV Licence Phishing Emails

You can report the scam to TV licensing directly by emailing them here: [email protected]. Alternatively, if you’ve fallen victim to the scam and entered any information, you can call Action Fraud on 0300 123 2040.