## Fraud

Fraud Alert

It has come to our attention that fraudsters are contacting members of the public purporting to be the Chairman or other authorized representative of Lido Financial Trust indicating that Lido Financial Trust is holding a substantial amount of money for them. The recipient of such communication is eventually asked to pay a small fee in return for collecting a much larger amount of money. Please be aware that this is fraudulent activity and is widely known as Advance Fee fraud.

Advance Fee fraud is a well-established scam that purports to offer the opportunity to earn a substantial sum of money for allowing funds to be transferred to your account in exchange for a small transfer fee. The approach can be made by letter, fax, email or telephone and invariably claims to be from a high ranking government or Financial Company official and may appear genuine if taken at face value. The scams often claim that you have been recommended by a business contact as a highly respected and trusted individual with high integrity. Victims of this fraud are repeatedly coerced to part with sums of money in order to help the transfer process and as the fraud progresses; a considerable amount of money can be lost. The promised transfer, of course, never arrives.

Should you receive this type of communication, the advisable action to take is to ignore it and to make no contact with the individuals. Kindly also forward any communication you have to us so that we can update our records and track such scams.

Fraud Advice

As part of our commitment to keeping your account and personal information safe and secure, we’ve assembled some useful tips for spotting fraudulent activities.

Phishing and spoofing

Phishing and spoofing emails look like official Financial Company emails and try to trick you into providing personal details. These emails may also ask you to call a phone number and provide account information. As some phishing sites have been known to distribute malicious software, we strongly recommend that you do not select the links provided in a phishing e-mail, as visiting these sites could place your computer at risk.

Ways to identify phishing and spoofing emails include:

- Links that appear to be Lido Financial Trust links but aren’t. If you place your cursor over a link in a suspicious email, your email program most likely shows you the destination URL. Do not click the link, but look closely at the URL: A URL that is formatted for example eiFinancial Company.fakewebsite.com is taking you to a location on fakewebsite.com. Just because “eiFinancial Company” is part of the URL does not guarantee that the site is an official Lido Financial Trust site.
- Requests for personal information. Lido Financial Trust emails will never ask you to reply in an email with any personal information such as your account number.
- Urgent appeals. We will never claim your account may be closed if you fail to confirm, verify or authenticate your personal information via email.
- Offers that sound too good to be true. We will never ask you to fill out a customer service survey in exchange for money, and then ask you to provide your account number so you can receive the money.
- Obvious typos and other errors. These are often the mark of fraudulent emails and websites. Be on the lookout for typos or grammatical errors, awkward writing and poor visual design.

If you receive a suspicious email that uses Lido Financial Trust name, forward it to us immediately.