We’ve seen a rash of scams lately, often in the form of phishing emails.
The way they work is to provoke a response in the way of contacting the scammer, usually by phone. The most common is some form of sending an invoice for goods or services not ordered, and almost always impersonating a well-known company.
In this post, I’ll show you an easy way to avoid most of these scams.
First, let’s start with a phishing example that uses a very convincing format of an invoice, supposedly from Geek Squad. It claims to be an invoice for subscription services owed. Can you identify any problems with it?
Looks pretty convincing, right? The right logos, a convincing set of services—perhaps they just sent it to the wrong person. Hey, you’d better contact them to get these charges reversed, right? Wrong! That’s exactly the provocation they’re using to get you to contact them.
Notice that this email has no links for contact, but only a phone number. What could be so wrong with calling them and at least giving them a piece of your mind, and maybe clearing up this billing error?
What’s wrong is that’s exactly how the scam works! You call them and they immediately know one of their phishing attempts hit its mark and they can now reel you in with additional lies.
Keep in mind, phishing is a crime, and the people behind this are criminals. They’re not the Geek Squad, and they’re not available to help you—they make their money via fraud. Most of the cases I’ve had to help out with have had victims giving these criminals access to their computer, and sometimes to their credit cards or bank accounts! (All in the name of processing a refund, of course.)
Here’s the fastest way to detect any such phishing scam, whether from Geek Squad, Best Buy, Western Union, PayPal, Microsoft, or any of the other typical guises. Remember, these are criminals, so the email is a lie, the amount owed is a lie, and everything else about them is a lie.
To detect such a scam, simply begin to forward the email so you can see the full email header. This should work with phone/tablet devices, laptops, or desktop computers. Here’s an example of what you might see, using a similar phishing email as an example:
No need to forward the email to any particular recipient. The point is to begin the forward so the email header can be plainly seen, as in the above image. What are we looking for? We need to see whether the person sending the email is legitimate, and we see above they are not. If legitimate, anything from Geek Squad should have an email address ending in @bestbuy.com, but we can clearly see this email address appears to have something to do with Geek Squad, but does not. Most of the phishing emails I see are from some bizarre gmail address, as in the example below:
This phishing detection method of simply starting to forward the email works whether the email has an attached invoice (PDF or Word document—do not open the attachment) or is from any other scammer. Take a look at the sender’s email address, and if that’s not from a legitimate company that you’ve done business with, it’s a phishing scam.
If you’re in doubt, you can always search the web to discover which domain (the ending of the email address) is the real deal. For instance, Geek Squad, being part of Best Buy, will end in bestbuy.com and Western Union will end in westernunion.com:
The best thing you can do is avoid any contact with these criminals at all. Do not unsubscribe (if available), do not reply to the email, and whatever you do, do not call the number in the email. These criminals make crime pay by being very convincing and getting you do perform more of the actions they want you to do, all of which get them closer to getting information, money, or account access.
If you’ve got any questions about any email you receive and suspect it might be a scam, you can contact us for help.
Stay alert, stay safe!
Paypal, Geek Squad, etc.