Prevention is the best cure
Banks like Kontist are committed to help their customers sometimes as a precaution automatically by blocking unusually high online remittances of a particular customer. However, the perpetrators can respond by focusing on many small amounts. And most of them get away with it because the police in Germany can only very rarely investigate which port hides behind a specific IP address. This usually does not have to be stored in Germany. What does help is a bank with technological prevention methods like Kontist. As we have discussed on the blog before and on our site, security is a feature we want to offer customers so they can have peace of mind regarding the most sensitive part of their business - their money!
Once you think about it, online phishing is not that far from real fishing. The one big difference is that online phishers are criminals. And unlike fishing for fish in the sea, the fraudsters are after all your personal data, bank details and other information. Unfortunately, apart from the totally paranoid mega vigilance in the user, there is no absolute cure for phishing attacks. The threat is like the flu - it keeps evolving and changing its types of attacks. Scammers can launch personal phishing campaigns that target employees of a specific company or people. It reminds you of a kind of harmful marketing, right?
If you discover a phishing campaign, you should tell your bank (if the scammers fake the bank's emails) or your social network support (if it sends malicious links to users). This will help your bank to catch the perpetrators. If possible, do not log in to your bank and similar online services over public Wi-Fi networks (for example, in a café or at the airport). It's better to use a mobile connection or wait to log in than to play into the hands of gamblers and lose money. After all, public networks can also be set up by scammers, who then redirect you to false websites.
And there are many ways for users to swallow the phisher bait: access to public Wi-Fi, log in to fake websites or clicking a link in a "cool" discounted email that promises exclusive holiday offers. It is impossible to enumerate all the possibilities. But it is important to take precautions where you can. It is never worth not taking the precaution, even though it is easy to think it would not happen to us. But, running a business means always asking, what if it did? Now you are probably already 100% sold on [being your own boss](https://kontist.com/posts/part-time-self-employment), and now you also have a background knowledge of what it is going to require to secure that business, and we wish you good luck! We take security seriously too!