| 5 tips to spot email fraud |
Here’s five tips to help you spot email frauds or scams. Look at the email address Sophisticated scammers will actually try to copy the legitimate company’s email account – a practice called spoofing. They will usually have a few changes like a missing letter from the address, or an extra . added. The easiest thing you can do is look for the sender’s site on the Internet. For example: You get an email from AMEX OPEN (American Express’s small business credit card) and notice that the sender’s email address just doesn’t look right. Go to Google and search for amex fraud. You’ll likely find the fraud page which tells you exactly how the company sends emails. If the sender is a smaller company, most of these will have email contact addresses right on the site, take a look and compare the two. If they are different, the email is likely a scam. Look at the sender’s website If you find a website, click through some pages to see if there is anything that looks out of place. For example a website selling a new financial service has pages with Coming Soon or you get errors when you try to load the page. If it looks fishy, it likely is – delete the email. It would also be a good idea to go to archive.org’s Wayback Machine, copy and paste the website’s URL into the The Wayback Machine Search bar and hit Take me back. This will bring up previous versions of the website. If you see that the site in question was something completely different a few months to a year ago (e.g., it is a financial services page now, but six months ago it was a page selling prescription drugs), chances are high it’s a fraud. Call them Similarly, if you call a local number of a supposedly small business and get routed directly to voicemail, it’s likely fraud. Look carefully at the body of the message You should also look for spelling errors, grammar mistakes or inconsistencies. While some fraudulent emails will have minor spelling inconsistencies, others will spell common words wrong. If you see mistakes like ‘our product are a great deals’, this should raise a warning flag. Spelling and grammar errors are a part of business communication, so don’t expect a perfect email from all companies, especially if you see that the company is located overseas. It’s the emails with mistakes supposedly coming from companies in your area that should really raise alarm. The sender asks for money or passwords Email fraud is a big deal, and unfortunately it will likely become even more common in the near future. This means you should be able to spot potentially fraudulent emails. If you think an email is a scam, it’s best to just delete it immediately. Don’t respond or forward it to colleagues or employees. If you need to let people know, write another email that describes the suspected email but has no links. You can also forward a screenshot to your colleagues or friends to illustrate the scam. Looking for more ways you can protect your company? Contact us today. We can work with you to develop a security system that will meet your needs. |
While being one of the most useful business tools ever invented, email can also be a hinderance. Because of its generally open nature, when anyone can get an email address, criminals have taken their operations online in the form of email frauds or scams. This can be a big issue for business owners, and knowing how to determine if an email is legitimate or not is important.| Tablet showdown - which is better? |
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When it comes to technology, there is so much to choose from that picking any system or device is a daunting task. This is especially true for tablets which come with different systems, apps and features. There’s also no doubting that tablets can help make many people’s jobs easier. So what do you do when you want a new tablet? The easiest thing is to compare them.| Define: overclocking |
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When it comes to technology there are so many different components, ideas, concepts, etc. that it can be hard to keep track of them all. It’s not made any easier by the fact that many of the acronyms and terms thrown around are confusing. A common term you may have heard and wondered about is overclocking. Do you know what it is?| Two new awesome Pinterest features |
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There are numerous ways a business can build a brand and ultimately grow. One of the most popular tools to help with this is social media, of which there are numerous services. The newest social media service is Pinterest which is dedicated to the sharing of images. Pinterest has recently been updated with a new layout and features that businesses with profiles will benefit from.| It's time to upgrade from Office 2003 |
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The tech industry is always moving forward, it seems that a new concept or system is introduced on a near weekly basis. This often comes at the cost of older systems which are left behind when developers stop supporting them. Unfortunately, many businesses still use these older systems or programs and are often left without valuable support. Microsoft has announced that they will stop supporting some older, yet still popular software.
