New e-mail scam takes tailored approach
December 7, 2009 by Sam NarisiPosted in: Communication, HR Tech, In this week's e-newsletter - Tech
There’s a new identity theft scam you and your company’s execs and employees should look out for.
Bob Grant, staff writer for The Scientist, tells a story of an e-mail he received.
The message invited Grant to speak at an upcoming conference on global health care. The e-mailer listed the names of several other experts who were signed on to speak. He was asked to simply respond to the conference organizer, who would take care of his travel arrangements.
The problem: When Grant contacted the venue where the event was supposedly being held, an employee said no such conference was scheduled for the specified dates.
Grant also got in touch with the other listed speakers, who were real experts in the field, but they had never heard about the conference.
Grant decided not to sign up, of course. He assumes the purpose of the scam is to dupe folks into turning over personal data (passport info, credit card numbers for a hotel room deposit, etc.) as part of the conference registration.
This is a highly personalized scam that some in your company may need to watch for. Remind employees: The best approach is to follow Grant’s lead and research the conference before turing over any personal information.
Tags: e-mail, identity theft, scams
December 8th, 2009 at 2:35 pm
Our corporation was recently contacted by a national magazine (one of course we had never heard of) asking to do an article on our corporate President. The “reporter” asked several basic questions regarding our business and said that he would take the info to his editors to get final approval. As we are a very small company, we were wary from the beginning. Several days later we received a very excited call from the “reporter” letting us know that his editor had approved the article and he would like to set up an appointment time for someone to come by to do the interview and get photos. His next statement finally brought the whole thing into perspective “Oh, by the way, I’m going to need a complete listing of all of your vendors and customers. Along with addresses, phone numbers and contacts.” When asked why this information was needed? His answer “We would like to contact your vendors to possibly secure advertising in the issued that your article would be printed, and would like to use your Customer list as a resource for future articles.” When he was told he was not going to get the lists . . . he very quickly became less than professional.
December 9th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
This happened to one of our customers, a very large nationally known general contractor. They did give them a list of vendors which we were one of… When we refused to advertise, this publisher got very upset, yelled over the phone and even called the general to talk us into changing our decision – like we were expected to spend thousands of dollars for advertising that we did not want. I didn’t want to point out to the general that they had been duped but it seemed pretty obvious to me when they couldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer without getting crazy.