I recently had cause to call into Gizmo’s for a phone charger. There was a fairly robust discussion going on as a customer had just exposed themselves to the crypto locker virus by opening an email purportedly from “Australia Post”. As scammers get more and more sophisticated, we as business owners also need to up our game in terms of vigilance.
Will Buckingham from Blue Sky IT gives us insight into what emails to look out for:
- If you’ve won the lottery or inherited millions – you really haven’t!
- Australia Post is a common scam at the moment, where you are advised that there is a parcel waiting for collection – just think for a moment as to how Australia Post has suddenly gotten a hold of your email address?
- The ATO and RMS – sending an email for a fine or penalty. Again, consider the likelihood of this? Where did the RMS suddenly get your email address from?
- Check the email address that the email has been sent from – often times the domain name itself (eg: regfin.com.au) will have no resemblance at all to the organisation that is supposedly emailing you. Sometimes it will bear a close resemblance, but a close look will show a slight variation in the spelling. Using regfin as an example, the email could be from regfin@hotmail.com: or mail@regfin.info.com
- If there is a link in the email to a website, hover over that link. If it doesn’t reveal a website or has lots of random letters and numbers, do not click on it
- The email has a zip or pdf file attached
- The email will often have grammatical or spelling errors. Consider how likely it is that a major corporation, spending millions of dollars a year on PR and marketing would put out an amateurish email with such errors in it
What can you do to protect yourself?
The best protection you can have is a good spam filter or antivirus that scan your email before you open them. And remember to trust instinct… if it sounds too good to be true, then the chances are that it is.