Evri, Amazon and Paypal among the brands most used by scammers, study reveals

A recent study by tech retailer Currys looked at Google searches in the UK around scam emails, and it seems Evri is the favourite brand scammers are using to target their victims, with 39,978 searches over the past year for “evri scam email”. These searches have also increased by 823% over the past 12 months, when comparing search volume in March 2023 to February 2024.

The next brand scammers hide behind most is PayPal with 28,900 searches over 12 months for “paypal scam email”, however, the monthly search volume for this has decreased by 19% over the past 12 months. And Amazon was the third brand most people were searching in relation to scam emails, with 14,000 annual searches for “amazon scam email”.

Keywords
Search volume over 12 months
(Mar 23-Feb 24)
% difference in search volume
(Mar 23 vs Feb 24)
1
evri scam email
39978
823%
2
paypal scam email
28900
-19%
3
amazon scam email
14000
-12%
4
natwest scam email
12409
-56%
5
bt scam email
9790
0%
6
hmrc scam email
9660
0%
7
royal mail scam email
9653
296%
8
microsoft scam email
9270
-33%
9
geek squad scam email
7871
120%
10
fedex email scam
7789
-84%
When it comes to the ones gaining momentum, these are the top five brands that scammers are using more now compared to a year ago to trick Brits.

Searches
% difference in search volume
(Mar 23 vs Feb 24)
1
boots scam email
2500%
2
evri scam email
823%
3
booking.com scam email
324%
4
royal mail scam email
296%
5
screwfix scam email
243%
AI can’t detect 10% of scam emails

The study also used two forms of AI to analyse a mixture of 40 genuine and scam emails, asking it to identify whether the email was a phishing attempt or a genuine communication from a brand.

The study discovered that both AI assistants incorrectly identified 10% of the mixture of scam and legitimate emails fed to them. Perplexity was better at discovering the spam emails, correct in 28 out of 29 cases, compared to Chat GPT 4 which only identified 27 out of 29 correctly.

And when it came to the legitimate emails, both recognised even less. Perplexity incorrectly categorised three genuine emails as spam and Chat GPT 4 did the same for two.