The Urgent Email Scam

An email that includes phrases like : “Quick Urgent - Share this information IMMEDIATELY” are very likely scams themselves. Very often this call to action is just a ruse to get recipients to share posts or emails as quickly as possible without much thought. The most efficient ones are crime related. Several examples are shown below and include one from “Chubb” advising that you must never flash headlights at an one coming car that has theirs off. The second is from the “S.A.P.S.” advising of virus infested emails and the third is advising people to hide their VIN numbers as this can be used to clone your car keys. They all sound real, convincing and plausible but are in fact all false and are all designed to get you to share ASAP, which you do with the best of intentions. Actually this type of scam is one of the first modern internet scams and was around long before social media. The idea was to get people to forward email to as many friends as possible. A trace accompanied the email and this ensured that all of these useable emails are directed back to the cyber-criminal. These emails could then be sold or used to spam you - which is why you get all those SPAM emails every day (which you don’t see much anymore thanks to spam blockers on your email server). Actually you still get them - you just don’t see them because they are intercepted by your internet provider.

It always amuses me when people say “Oh I just delete those” without actually realising that it is too late. Your friend has already sent you the email with your address on it, so it would be in your best interests to advise your friend that before they forward this stuff to check the facts first. Even this post, which for sure is going to get forwarded by some well-meaning people, should be checked first. Once you determine that a source is reliable and safe then you are free to share and forward as much as possible, but until then be cautious. Just because a reputable company like CHUBB is attached or the S.A.P.S. logo is on the post doesn’t mean it is legitimate.

Nowadays it is very rare to see these types of scams – there is a quicker more reliable way to get email addresses and information. It is of course the popular like/share scams. These posts with accompanying pictures you encounter every day from your friends sharing “type Amen if you love Jesus” – “click LIKE if you think people who abuse animals should be castrated” – “SHARE if you think we should bring back the death penalty” and so on. These posts each are designed to target different sectors of the community. By liking and sharing one of these posts you are allowing access to your page and identifying yourself as a soft target. Teams of hackers troll through the data bases created from these likes and shares looking for suitable candidates for various scams. One of the quickest ways to get a huge data base up and running is to offer a fake prize. Recent examples include Emirates & Virgin Flights, Mercedes Benz and Sony PlayStation. I watched one develop this afternoon. It was a fake Emirates page offering flights to lucky winners. All you had to do was comment, like and share. It began at roughly 3pm and within the hour had garnered roughly 300 likes and shares. Within 5 hours it had gotten over 10 000 likes and shares. That’s 10 000 people, all suckered into believing the offer real and all allowing cybercriminals possible access to their Facebook pages. These pages are then sold on the black market for various nefarious uses already discussed on other articles. The only way to counter these scams is knowledge. The more people that know the better. I realise that sometimes these scam buster posts irritate people and I have received some interesting feedback from readers saying things like – “If these people have no common sense and they are so gullible, let them be scammed”. I disagree. It is not always about common sense, gullibility or intelligence. When you watch a magician saw a lady in half or make someone float and you don’t know how it is done – it doesn’t mean you are stupid. It just means you don’t know the secret of the illusion. It is the same with scams. Not everyone can see the scam because they just don’t know it is a scam and not everyone gets a chance to read the warning posts that get put up on forums and community pages. If they are not online at the right time, they might miss it, so it is important to keep putting the info out there. If by sharing this we get to save just one person from a scam, that’s one less target for the scammers. If you haven’t yet had a chance to watch our video about how to “Scam Proof your Computer”, I highly recommend this as a starting point to ensure your computer is safe from these trolls. The video can be found in our videos section.

#scam #chubb #saps #phishing #email #urgent