Navigating the cyber universe to safeguard you and your family

As technology continues to evolve, so do the tactics used by cyber criminals. There has been a growth in cyber fraud, and it has crept into our lives in a steady way that may seem harmless to the human eye. From highly personalized phishing messages and emails to creating realistic situations online to create urgency and exploit one of our most natural human instincts—trust.

Understanding how cyber fraud is growing—and how RBC Wealth Management is responding—can help protect you, your loved ones, and your financial wellbeing.

Get to know what’s trending in today’s cyber fraud landscape

Scams can happen to anyone, and cyber criminals continue to discover new ways to gain access to your personal and financial information¹. Many of today’s cyberattacks are designed to look and sound convincing, making them harder to recognize at first glance.

Fraudsters often rely on urgency, trust, and familiarity to trick individuals into sharing sensitive information or sending money. Understanding the current cybercrime trends can help protect you and your family.

• Social media as a scam enabler: Scammers may leverage social media platforms to lend credibility to their schemes, particularly in areas like cryptocurrency and romance scams, luring their targets to visit information-gathering websites.
• Hyper-personalized phishing scams: Emails and text messages remain a primary threat, with attackers employing highly tailored scams to target individuals to disclosing their information. These emails and messages tend to provide a fake reason, such as a security breach or an incentive, to make targets click a link or share sensitive details about themselves or their accounts.
• Grandparent scams: When fraudsters pose as a loved one who claims to be hurt or in trouble, and in need of money immediately. This can appear as an email, text message, or even through a phone call.

While these scams aren’t new, staying informed about common fraud tactics, knowing the warning signs and implementing habits can help you recognize suspicious activity and protect against cyberattacks.

Cyber best practices

Most cyberattacks can be diminished through basic cyber security practices². You can help keep you and your family’s personal and financial information secure through a few daily habits. This includes:

• Enable automatic updates for softwares and systems, which will help fix any existing vulnerabilities to the technologies.
• Ignore calls, text messages or emails that ask for your credentials. Cybercriminals may contact you by impersonating your Investment Advisor, government employees or RBC staff. Your Investment Advisor does not ask for confidential information such as passwords or credit card numbers via phone, email, or text message.
• Keep an eye out for warning signs you may come across in emails and text messages. This can include urgent or threatening language, request for personal information, poor grammar, strange logos, and suspicious links.
• Keep your social media accounts private and be cautious of what you and your family share online. Cybercriminals can go through social media accounts to look for any personal information that may help them trick targets into engaging with them.
• Report any RBC-related messages or emails you may find suspicious to your Investment Advisor and to phishing@rbc.com, then delete the communication.

While staying informed and taking simple precautions can go a long way to protect you from cyberattacks, the cyber landscape continues to evolve and no set of measures is fully comprehensive, but you’re not alone. 

Safeguarding your wealth

Protecting your wealth and personal information is one of our top priorities at RBC Wealth Management. As the cyber threat and regulatory landscape continues to evolve, we continuously enhance our cybersecurity capabilities in alignment with the National Institute of Standard and Technology (NIST) framework. This framework guides how we identify, protect, detect, respond to and recover from cyber threats.

Our dedicated cybersecurity team operates 24 hours a day, working to safeguard your personal and financial information from an evolving landscape of digital threats.

We continue to develop our cybersecurity capabilities by driving education for our teams, and leverage cyber technologies to give you peace of mind when sharing your information. For example, the RBC Trusted Partner Portal is a secure and efficient file-sharing tool designed to ensure that only you, your advisor and other authorized individuals can access your sensitive documents and information.

These safeguards form a strong, resilient security framework designed to protect your wealth, your data and your confidence as a client of RBC Wealth Management.  

Your safety is our priority. Please contact your Investment Advisor if you have any questions or concerns or visit www.rbc.com/cyber-security/ for the latest cyber information.

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