Who doesn’t love a good win? An unexpected email on a weekday morning telling you that you’ve won the latest Shark gadget or a weekend in Edinburgh, and, suddenly, the rest of your week feels lighter and rose-tinted. It’s the thing that makes filling in all those online forms, scouring forums for competitions, and regularly checking your spam mail worthwhile.
But entering online competitions is a risk, and for many different reasons at the same time. Here’s why.
Many are legitimate, but many aren’t…
If you’re a seasoned competitor online, you probably know this one already, but it certainly bears repeating. The more legitimate competitions there are out there, the more illegitimate ones there will be, too, since chancers and bad actors will quickly latch onto new trends and trusted formats in order to capture the next wave of hopefuls.
Think about it. You’re willing to hand over your name, address, age, email, and your phone number. There’s a reason the good companies want those in exchange for an entry into their competition, and it isn’t just ‘bureaucracy’. Data is valuable. That’s exactly why the bad actors want it, too.
With generative AI making it incredibly easy for scammers to put together convincing-looking posts with celebrity-like ‘endorsers’ talking about how great the competition is, can you really trust your own ability to sort the real from the slop?
Even if they are legitimate, they might not be secure
So, let’s say the answer to that question was ‘yes’. Great! But what about the security protocols being adopted by the legitimate sites? How do they shape up?
Data breaches are getting increasingly common – again, thanks to AI making it easier for scammers to perform massive, sophisticated attacks in just a few minutes. The more websites you give your data to, the greater the risk that your data will end up in the wrong hands someday.
It doesn’t have to be immediate. Sometimes, years pass by – that’s why you’ll sometimes be notified of a breach on a site you haven’t used since you were in school. Your data is only as safe as someone else makes it.
You probably aren’t using a new password for each one
Entering an online competition means creating an account. How else would you hand over all that valuable data? The trouble is, we don’t like to think too hard about creating passwords, especially when it’s the 5th one we’ve had to create this month. It feels innocent, since you haven’t got any payment details or compromising data attached to this account, right?
But what about all the other accounts protected by the same password and email address combination? AI enables hackers to try credential stuffing at a massive scale, which means any of your accounts that share the same password could end up being hacked without much difficulty.
The safest option is to make a new password for every single account you create online, and to store them all in a secure password manager.
It’s easy to get complacent
The more you’re exposed to something without trouble, the safer you’ll feel doing it next time. It’s human nature, and, often, is an instinct founded in logic.
This isn’t so when you’re online. All online competitions and sites should be treated with the same amount of skepticism. Check what other people are saying online, how long they’ve been operating for, whether any past winners exist out there, and whether the site feels legitimate, or like yet more AI slop trying to hoodwink innocent people…
Images courtesy of unsplash.com, pexels.com and Freepix.com
