 The APWG's Internet Policy Committee and APWG research fellows have collaborated to educate consumers about fax-based phishing and established the APWG Fax Back Phishing Education Program. The goal of this initiative is to instruct consumers about protecting themselves against offline phishing scams at the “most teachable moment”: when they have just responded to a phishing communication via fax.  How the program works:
The APWG has created a warning and instruction page in PDF and TIFF file formats that can be faxed back to a consumer immediately after they've sent information to a fax line that had been determined to be used by criminal actors and subsequently taken out of their control. The instructional fax page explains that they have just fallen for a fax-based phishing communication (fax, email, SMS or otherwise) and advises consumers and enterprise technology users in ways they can help themselves to avoid being victimized in the future and how to report the attempt to government agencies. APWG is offering this program's content to dedicated online faxing services, telecommunications companies and hosts of Fax-over-IP applications (FoIP) so that they can help advise consumers and enterprise IT users who have fallen prey to scams animated by these services' compromised infrastructure. Instructions for using the APWG Fax Back Phishing Education Program content can be found here at the program How-To page: |
