Category: Phishing

Today I received a pretty slick email from the BBB. Or was it?

Since I am not a member of the BBB I knew this was spam right away but the email is pretty elaborate.

The FROM name was from the Better Business Bureau BUT viewing the headers I could easily see the email was from overseas bad guy.

I rolled my mouse over all of the links to see where they were linking – and most of them actually linked to Docusign or the BBB respectively. However, the main button and the FROM email ADDRESS (not the FROM NAME) were from Denmark.

Take a look at the actual email (screen shot below)

What you need to do when receiving a phishing email like this?

A) NEVER CLICK ON EMAIL CONTENT RIGHT AWAY: When you receive an email, quickly view the email, roll your mouse over the links and buttons but DO NOT CLICK on the links until you are sure that it is a valid email. We are so busy with our lives and receive so many emails from our banks, spam, business emails, etc. that we often drop our guard to click quickly on emails that we think are legitimate. Unfortunately, before you realize you were scammed, you may have logged into their fake website, given them your username and password and then they wreak havoc on your accounts or your device(s) by gaining access to your accounts or otherwise gaining access to your computer or phone from a link that you clicked.

B) REPORT IT: Head on over to: https://www.usa.gov/stop-scams-frauds  (yes, this is a valid website). You can simple put REPORT PHISHING SCAM into your search engine and find this url yourself. It will help others and at least get the scam out there.

C) NEVER REPLY: Never reply to these emails. This tells the would be hacker/phisher/scammer that you are a valid account and person and it is ok to attack you further. They use mass email to send out these scams so it is best to just hit delete, report spam or notify the authorities above.

Norton has an excellent more detailed blog about “How To Protect Against Phishing” here.

I just thought that I should get this one out there for any business owners that inadvertently click on this type of phishing email.

Thank you,

James Byrne, Information Architect (USMC VET)