Phishing (email, text & phone scams)
Phishing is a scam where fraudulent emails/texts are sent or calls made to people in an attempt to trick them into revealing personal or financial information. If someone was to reply or click on any of the links or attachments in these emails/texts, they will be taken to a fake page which will try to deceive them into entering personal information such as a username, password, credit card or bank account information. Similarly a phone caller may try to trick a customer into giving their bank details in return for a special offer.
Phishing emails/texts or calls may circulate randomly from time to time pretending to come from Electric Ireland. They may contain realistic-looking logos, official-sounding text and familiar branding. They may also link to exact clones of official web pages. However, these emails/texts & calls are fraudulent and have nothing to do with Electric Ireland.
If you clicked on any link or attachment in these emails/texts and provided personal or financial information we would advise you to contact us as well as your bank or debit/credit card company immediately using the phone number listed on your bank statement or on the back of your debit/credit card.
Note that your email address/phone number can often be found from publicly available sources, or randomly generated. Therefore if you receive a fake email/text that appears to be from Electric Ireland, this does not mean that your email address, name or any other information has been gathered from Electric Ireland systems.
How to identify a phishing email
- Don’t trust the display name: A common phishing tactic is to spoof the display name of an email, i.e. make it appear as if it came from an Electric Ireland. This fraudulent email, once delivered, appears legitimate because most user inboxes only present the display name. Don’t trust the display name. Check the email address in the header from— if it looks suspicious, delete the email.
- Look but don’t click: Hover your mouse over any links embedded in the body of the email. If the link address looks unusual, don’t click on it. If you want to login to your account online, type in the website address directly into your browser address bar rather than clicking on the link from unsolicited emails.
- Don’t give up personal information: We will never ask for personal or financial information via email. If an email requests this information it is more than likely a phishing scam.
If you have any concerns or suspicions about an email please feel free to contact us and we will advise you on what to do.