So I thought I'd let you know of my brush with this phishing website. I fell for it too, largely because it ranked at the top when I searched in Google, and the description matched what I wanted to do - find the best way to get going with Sky Go, because there wasn't a link to any info on Sky's website.
The phishing website looked like Sky, and seemed like a simple portal that would let me into Sky Go. I wanted to watch a live football match, so I logged in. After I logged in, I got an error message in Russian on the dodgy website, and I knew I was in trouble. I think that within 5 minutes, I'd changed my password on sky.com. And that was probably too late. The dodgy people probably have a script to auto log into Sky, using my password.
The only info that Sky has for me is my name, address and a home phone number. Variants of my Sky password are not in use on any financial or important websites anywhere else. I use a password manager, so I'll use that to track down those variants - and get them changed.
Now I can't say for sure that this next stuff was the work of my phishing Russians but the following happened:
Same Day: I went to log into my PayPal on my PC. I couldn't log in. PayPal seemed to be in a lockdown. I log into PayPal using the same email address as I do for Sky. The password is different for PayPal, so I can only assume that the phishers have had some automatic thing going on where they try to hack financial websites using the details they just stole.
Same Evening: I get a popup from a credit monitoring app to say that adverse information has been added!
The Next Day (today): I get a letter from Experian explaining that they'd received an online application for a Free Experian subscription in my name at my current address! Experian explains that fraudsters likely want to gain information so that they can commit identity theft.
Today: An email from another monitoring app (MoneySuperMarket). This was about the same attempt by the fraudsters.
I'm going to have to be very vigilant about my credit files from now on.
But I thought I would let you know what you can expect if you did fall for this phish (or any phishing) like I did, in case this is helpful.
And echo what others have said about not using the same passwords (or variants of) for other sites. Not using the same passwords elsewhere has probably saved me a whole new world of pain.
I'd recommend too signing up for the following apps to keep an eye on your credit files: ClearScore, Credit Karma and MoneySuperMarket. Together, these three apps cover the three main Credit Reference Agencies in use in the UK, like Experian. Oh, and these apps are free to use!
