Workshop 4: Identifying online scams, phishing, fraudulent websites and messages workshop

Identifying online scams, phishing, fraudulent websites and messages workshop

29^th November at 3:45pm (free online)

Join

As part of this free online session, Maria Bell from Mesomorphic will offer an overview of the 4th theme of our new series of “Maddie is Online: ethics of online safety and security" on 'Identifying online scams, phishing, fraudulent websites and messages'.

We are going to review Series 4 'Maddie is Online' toolkit, pp. 52-64. The toolkit for series 4 can be found here. You can also download it as PDF. Please have the toolkit open for the session.

The concepts that will be explored include the following:

• How to recognise messages, websites or e-mails where the sender/owner appears to be different from who they are.
• Understand why it is important to know how to recover a device or account if it gets compromised / hacked.
• To create awareness of whom to contact if you find that your account has been hacked, if embarrassing images of you are being shared, or if you experience something else that is really unpleasant.

We have created an imaginative story ('To donate or not to donate?'). Maddie, the central character of our series, receives an email from her school, reminding her class that it is the last day for donating money to the school nominated charity, ‘Strong Family Corners’, before it gets collected and sent to the charity. In the email, there is a bank account to make the payment with the logo of the charity and the email has been sent by a teacher. Maddie decides to donate to the charity. However, the next day, when she goes to school, she realises that the charity name is not the same and that the email of the teacher was hacked. Someone had used his email details to send this message to all the school and several children had followed the link to make the payment, exactly like Maddie. How could Maddie have protected herself? Should she avoid giving to any charities once and for all?

Join us for this session to make a decision together on what is best for Maddie!

About the work

“Maddie is Online: a creative learning path to ethics of online safety and security for young people” is a project funded by the Scottish Government and supported by Digital Xtra Fund.

Our purpose is to engage schools with the concepts of an Ethical Digital Nation:

"Growing as an ethical digital nation and developing trust in the way we use data and apply digital technology is a collective responsibility” (Scottish Government Ethical Digital Nation).

Why focus on ethics?

Children and young people can benefit from a greater exposure to online ideas, opportunities for learning, creativity and connectivity, but there are also causes for concern, abound in modern discussions of data ethics: they are equally vulnerable to the pitfalls and harms that can befall anyone, who is unfamiliar with safeguarding their own rights.

You can also find other previous projects via the 'Maddie is Online' bookshelf.