The Spam is Coming!
Be aware in case you get anything funny from me
Hey everyone,
It’s ironic that I’m writing this email to you in October, which is Cybersecurity Awareness month. Today we had an email go out to the church council that was asking them for gift cards in a large amount of money. It sounded really off to them so I started getting text messages from a number of folks asking what was going on.
That’s good and exactly what we should do!!
What happened was that whoever this spammer is, got a hold of an email that I’d sent out, that had all of the council email addresses on it. They then created a fake email address that looked a lot like mine, but replaced one of the o’s with a 0.
Some things to be aware of, because this kind of thing is pretty common. Just a couple of years ago I got a similar email from one of our old District Superintendents, and around that same time some folks were getting one from our Bishop too. If someone is asking for gift cards, and you don’t know anything about it, its probably spam. This could be true of a lot of things. Facebook spam accounts use the same principle. They haven’t actually hacked into someone’s account, but they’ve created a brand new one and just copied over a lot of things.
Some good tips
If it sounds off, it probably is
Whatever you do, don’t reply to them (even to spam callers and you think you might be wasting their time if you can keep them on the line or “give them a taste of their own medicine” they are probably recording it and can use the audio in different ways)
Check the email address and compare it to one you know is correct. There will probably be a small difference, most likely a letter/number change that looks similar
Report the email as spam. Every email service has a way of reporting spam. Some of them even flagged the email that came out supposedly from me as spam
Contact me (or whoever supposedly sent it) using either text or the correct email address. There’s not much we can do, but we can be aware of it and help others to know about it
If you haven’t changed your email password in a while and you don’t use a password manager or two-factor authentication, then it wouldn’t hurt to change your password
If someone is asking for money or gift cards and you weren’t expecting it, always verify it with someone else. There is a common scam going around where the scammers fake being grandkids that have gotten in trouble, or friends who have gotten stuck on vacation in another country and they need money.
Most important, don’t panic and feel like you have to change all of your passwords. You don’t have to, unless you sent them your password. After you’ve done these things, delete the email if your email provider hasn’t done it already
If you’ve made it this far into this email, then have some fun with Spam tonight from one of my favorite songs from when spam was something very different
Have a great rest of your weekend, and we’ll see you on Sunday!