Anatomy of a Scam Email

I get a few of these a year. 

Scam emails are an inevitable hazard if you do business on the Internet. 

They tend to be more subtle than your typical personal scam letters, which usually appeal to greed. "Hi, can you help me get money I'm not supposed to have. I'll give you a huge cut." OR "There's a pile of money here that you know really doesn't belong to you. But if you give me your banking information (and everything else I need to steal your identity) I'll make you rich!"

Scam letters aimed at your business tend to look like more legitimate queries. But if you look at them carefully, you can see the telltale signs that they mean trouble. 

There are a lot of hints to indicate that you're dealing with a scam email. Among them, vague references to your services and location without showing that they have ever read your website. Often the recipient's name or the name of his/her business is not even used.

Typically these scams include an offer to send you a check in excess for your fee, which you're supposed to either distribute among other vendors or refund the difference.  The scammers' goal is for you to deposit the check so they can somehow cancel it and suck the funds from your account.

This isn't just for wedding professionals. Anyone with a business could be targeted. Here's an email I received recently. Hopefully this will help you avoid a scam.

In Which I Remember to Think First

I can be a bit reactionary. 

This is especially true when I am tired or not feeling well (as I am today) and my reactions often works in phases of worry>suspicion> righteous indignation> (return to start and repeat).  Which is why today I give myself a gold star for how I ultimately dealt with the three seemingly random text messages I received this morning--all some variation on "My prayers are with you today." 

Reaction 1: Worry

Given recent events my first thoughts were," Shit! What happened now?" I wondered, was someone hurt? Who died?

As I steeled myself to face one more horrible thing, I woke up enough to remember that people don't just text in those situations.

I stared at my phone again. No missed calls. No voice messages threatening to reveal some new doom.

I went back to the text messages again. Was it a wrong number? But there were three of them, all from different numbers.

Now, my "worry response" to perceived emergencies is to go into rescue mode. But finding nothing that needed helping/fixing/or saving, I moved into

Reaction 2: Suspicion

My next thought was that this must be some kind of scam, but as far as I could tell none of the messages included a link, so how would such a scam work?

I took a moment to Google text messaging scams. I didn't see anything of relevance.

Maybe it was something else? All three messages had the same theme. Was this some massive organized attempt at proselytizing via text message?

I moved quickly towards

Reaction 3: Righteous Indignation

I realized it was Good Friday and my theory became more plausible.

I thought, "Do they expect that you will react and send a response--thus setting yourself up for an endless text conversation about how God loves you and you should join their church? "

Now I was getting pissed. Nothing raises my hackles like the arrogance of people who think I (or anyone else) need to be saved from my own spiritual beliefs.

I considered tweeting and posting on FB to see if anyone else had encountered this phenomena. In the back of my mind an angry blog post was already being composed.

It was at about that point when put the brakes on.  Indulging in angry emails and posts usually lead to trouble. I have a system of self-imposed waiting periods specifically for situations like this. 

It was time to take a step back. 

I looked back at the text messages again. One was signed by a familiar name--but a common one. I decided, to Google the phone numbers. Two were unfamiliar but my search showed the numbers were local. The third, the one that was signed, was not local, but after scrolling down through the search results, I came upon a last name to go with the familiar first--a friend of my friend who was in the hospital.

That friend had sent the first text message of the day saying her surgery had been postponed and would we route for [her] Yankees as she would miss the game.

Now it all made sense. These texts were in response to her text--which I had not noticed went to a group--my response probably went out to everyone as well. --Which probably means that amidst all of those heartfelt texts that have now circulated amongst my friend's friends, everyone has probably had a moment who wonder who sent this message:

Good Luck! (Go Yankees!)

Another Facebook Scam??

Normally I don’t blog about the tech stuff, but this seems like the best way to get the word out en mass to my friends and social media students.

This morning I found this email in my SPAM filter. It said someone had posted a link to my Wall on Facebook. It was odd because this was for an account I had made by mistake in my early attempts to create a Fan Page—back when they made the links to starting one less obvious.

Account information and URLs obscured.

My spidey sense was tingling so I checked the Wall in question directly, rather than clicking on any of the links in the email.

Sure enough, no sign of this person’s post. I checked my settings and “Friends can post to my wall” is not enabled.  Also this account has no friends to begin with.

Friends can not post on this wall

This account has no friends

Now I would have deleted this post anyway had it been there. I don’t like SPAM but the fact that the email appears legit is cause for concern.

So my advice—if you get an email claiming to be from Facebook that doesn’t seem right don’t click the links. Go directly to your Facebook account to see what’s there.

Better safe than sorry.