How Your Business Can Become The Target Of A Scam

Phishing and E-Mail Scams are a lucrative criminal endeavor. The US Secret Service estimates that more than $100 million every year are stolen through these scams. While these scams are becoming increasingly more sophisticated, with the increased media exposure of these scams it is difficult to believe that so many people fall suspect to these scams each year. I think part of the reason for so many people getting caught in these scams is human nature but a large part is a lack of understanding of how easy technology makes it for the criminals to operate these scams.

On of the businesses we operate is an Internation used car sales service. The service has a large online presence and advertises heavily using online classified services. This business was recently the target of an attempted scam. The scam consisted of an individual claiming to be a representative of the Ghanese government  sending us an inquire about purchasing a number of vehicles. While we have never received an inquirey directly from a government we frequently receive legitimate request for proposals from individuals and businesses looking to purchase cars from overseas, as this is a large portion of our business. We may have even entertained this attempted scam instead of immediatley reporting it to the authorities if not for the spelling mistakes and general amateur look and feel of the e-mailed request that we received. Even though we did not become victims, this still begs the question of how our business was targeted by some crooks half-way around the world.

I find it very difficult to believe that the process of identifying targets for scams is manual. I believe this is a numbers game. The more e-mails that the scammer sends out the more likely are his chances of success, similar to how e-mail marketing works in general. So, how did we receive such a seemingly targeted e-mail? Two words: e-mail harvesting.

Using an e-mail extraction software, scammers can build gigantic keyword specific lists of e-mail addresses collected from websites on the Internet. In our situation, the scammer may have been building a list using the keywords “internationl used car sales.” These are keywords that some of our advertising is optimized for. As the extraction software locates these keywords on a website, it then searches for any e-mail addresses on the website. Our sales inquiry e-mail address is an example of an e-mail address that this program found on our website. Once the scammer has built a huge list of targeted e-mail addresses, he or she could use mail-merge software or other types of e-mail automation to send the same targeted message to everyone the list that was built. I believe that possibly thousands of individuals and businesses involved in international vehicle sales received the same e-mail that we did.

One of the reasons that we did not fall to the scammers ploy was because we spend most of our day using the Internet and are well aware of scammers and the tools that they could use.  I would think that a scam like this would be much more likely to work on someone not as familiar with the Internet that is barely comfortable with e-mail and basic browsing. Unfortunantely, a recent article on crunchgear.com shows that even young professionals comfortable with the Internet can fall for the schemes of a scammer.

Ways To Protect Yourself and Your Business

1. Do not display e-mail addresses as text on your website. Use contact forms or display them as graphics. You can use this tool to obfuscate your address to prevent a harvester from being able to use your e-mail: http://www.mways.co.uk/prog/hidemail.php
2. Report scam mail to spam@uce.gov and 419.fcd@usss.treas.gov
3. If you receive an e-mail that seems to be legitimate and you decide to move forward with a transaction, verify identities through third parties. In our case, we discussed our matter with the Consulate General Of Ghana in New York and a client of an unrelated business that has operations in Ghana.

Related articles by Zemanta

• When computer illiterates become spammers (blogs.law.harvard.edu)
• Hide your email address on your website from spam harvesters (igeek.co.za)
• Chris Kenton Uncovers Spam Mafia (stoweboyd.com)
• Catching Spammers in the Act (technologyreview.com)
• Facebook Phishers Target Notification Messages [ALERT] (mashable.com)
• US hacker pleads guilty to huge ID theft (guardian.co.uk)
• Hackers target Guardian jobs site (guardian.co.uk)

Ghana · Scam

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