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26th Jan 2016

Irish Water Warns Public To Be Vigilant About Scammers Impersonating The State

Scammers have attempted to solicit account details.

Megan Cassidy

Irish Water has issued a warning to the public to be vigilant following an email phishing scam.

Scammers sent emails with the Irish Water logo requesting users to login via a hyperlink for “annual account maintenance”.

The email states the following:

“Irish Water is performing the annual account maintenance procedure. Please login to your account and complete the requested actions.

“Once you logged in you will be guided to the rest of the process. Log into My Water now to complete the maintenance.”

However, a spokeswoman for Irish Water, Florence White, told The Herald that the emails are bogus.

She explained:

“Technically speaking, it has nothing to do with us, but the people sending out these emails are purporting to be from Irish Water, so we just want people to be aware that it’s not us.

“It’s people right across the country, it’s not specific to Irish Water customers.

She assured customers that no one has accessed Irish Water data in order to access contacts:

“They don’t have any of our customer information, and I don’t know where they got the email addresses from”.

The agency also noted that they will never send emails of this nature looking for financial information:

“If you got an email then you would be the one that would report it, because the criminal activity was looking to access your information.

“Irish Water data is absolutely secure. We would have no way of knowing who the emails went to because we didn’t send them, so we’d have no way of knowing what complaint we could make to the Gardaí.”