TV Licensing phishing email campaign targets thousands of people’s financial information

• The phishing email campaign contains subject lines such as ‘correct your licensing information’, ‘billing information update, ‘renew now’, etc.
• The phishing email asks for victims’ names, dates of birth, email addresses, phone numbers, and payment card details including account number, sort code, and CVV number.

A phishing email scam designed to appear as if sent from the UK’s TV Licensing is targeting thousands of people for compromising their payment details.

Action Fraud reported that it had received more than 5000 complaints on the phishing email scam over the past 3 months. These emails feature subject lines such as ‘correct your licensing information’, ‘billing information update’, ‘renew now’ to urge people into clicking the link attached along with the email.

Upon clicking the link in the email, victims will be redirected to a legitimate looking TV Licensing website. The fraudulent website is designed to extract victims’ personal and financial information by asking victims to submit their names, dates of birth, email addresses, phone numbers, and payment card details including account number, sort code, and CVV number.

Warning issued by TV Licensing

Upon learning about the incident, TV Licensing published a warning on its website. In the warning, it has requested its customers to take the following steps.

• TV Licensing requests its customers to delete the phishing email if they’ve received one.
• In case if any of its customers have already clicked the link, TV Licensing requests them to not submit any information.
• Further, if any customer has submitted any information, the company requests them to report to Action Fraud.
• The company further requests its customers to contact the company to confirm if they have sent an email.
• It also warned its customers that any email with subject lines such as ‘Action required’, ‘Security Alert’, ‘System Upgrade’, ‘There is a secure message waiting for you’, should be considered as suspicious.

The company confirmed that it will never email its customers to inform that customers are entitled to a refund or to ask its customers to pay additional money for services.

Recommendations

TV Licensing urges its customers to check the link attached with those phishing emails. “If you are on a desktop computer, hover over the links in the email (but don’t click them) to see their destination and check the web address carefully. If you can’t hover over the links (e.g. because you are on a phone or tablet) or are not sure what to do, just go directly to the TV Licensing website,” the warning read.

“We will almost always use one of the following email addresses ‘donotreply[at]tvlicensing[dot]co[dot]uk’, ‘no-reply[at]tvlreminders[dot]co[dot]uk’. Occasionally, we partner with other companies to send out emails. These companies include InfoBase-X and Acxiom Limited, who may email you – on behalf of TV Licensing – from Infobase-XConsumer[at]dm-uk1[dot]com,” the warning added.