Russia-based cybersecurity firm, Kaspersky, reported that phishing and social engineering scams in the second quarter were more than double those in the first quarter. The company detected 10,722,886 phishing attacks in Africa in Q2—a 234% increase from the previous quarter.
Phishing is when a scammer pretends to be someone or a business that you know to trick you into clicking a link in an email or website to get your personal information.
The research shows intense scamming activities were carried out on fraudulent pages posing as airline and travel booking services. They also posed in emails with overly generous offers of discounts or promos.
According to the report, in the past 3 months, 5,098,534 phishing attacks were detected in Kenya. In South Africa 4,578,216 scams were detected, and in Nigeria 1,046,136.
The report surmises that these scams are proportional to the amount of tech growth happening in the countries.
