A fraudulent email scam has targeted users of the DPS, tricking them into revealing their logins and passwords and, according to an undated DPS email message, a small group has fallen for the scam.
The DPS website blog says:
“The fraudulent email asks the recipient to verify their account and provides a link within the email to click on.
“The fraudsters have created a fake website to support the deception in an attempt to make the email appear official.
“We’ve informed the relevant authorities about the fraud and the website has been taken down.
“However, as is typical in these kind of scams, each time a fake website is shut down another will appear in its place, so please stay vigilant.
“The scam targets landlords as well as tenants, so all users of our website need to remain vigilant and protect their account details from the fraudsters.”
Matt Trevett, Managing Director at The DPS said:
“A number of landlords, letting agents and tenants recently received ‘phishing’ emails that falsely claimed to have been sent by us.
“The security of our website was not compromised.
“As an additional measure, we’re resetting passwords and security information for some landlords and letting agents. “
Comments (1)
The reality is that the DPS sent out an email explaining what had happened/was going to happen which arrived in lots of agents Junk mailboxes.
When the emails saying our email address had been changed and to click on the link to reactivate our access arrived at the end of the working day, a lot of us had to call the help centre to find out what was going on. I spent 1/2 hour in a queue to be met with a total lack of empathy which is endemic across the DPS.
All they had to do was to delay sending the ‘reset’ email which effectively changed my login to the same one I already had until they’d let the industry press know to avoid wasting all of our time.
They have since put an alert on their home page but that was not present when I received my emails.