Do Not Click This! It's a Scam!

If you're reading this line, then I guess you didn't listen. It's cool, I would've done the same thing too, along with MILLIONS of other people as well.

See, in this ever-increasing pace that life seems to bestowed upon us, our attention span is getting shorter, and the amount of stimuli we receive is growing larger.

The net result of this is our brain giving a highly unusual number of green cards for scam/spam/phishing messages that arrive in our inboxes and smartphones.

Messages like:

"Your package couldnt' be deliverdd" <- Yes, as spelt!

"Your account has been suspended."

"You credit card has been declined"

"Here is your bill from <insert service provider> Please go to www.notasuspectwebsiteatall.com/paymesuckers"

Clicking on said messages can result in nothing, some nasty surprises further down the track, or some immediate "Oh shit, what's happening to my files? Oh no what have done??" Inaudible yelling from numerous cubicles. "Holy f@%k I'm going to get fired! Why did I do that? I never do that!!...." moments.

So, what can you do when you receive these?

The blanket rule here is to do nothing. Just ignore that ish. But if you want to dig a little deeper, read on.

• Check the email address it's been sent from. Often a display name will mask the under lying email address and tapping on the display name in some cases, will show the email.

Example:

Display Name: This is Your Mum <- replace with your Mum's real name.

Email Address: [email protected] <- not your Mum's email address, obviously.

• Check the language. At this point in time (cause you know AI is gonna flip the script on this very soon) the language used in these messages is pretty poor. There are spelling mistakes, it doesn't read very well, and your inner English Teacher should pick up on this and say "This is terrible. A definite F! F these guys!!"
• Check the website they're trying to send you to. Similar to the email / language points, the websites that are listed in these messages (usually SMSes) are slight derivates of the original. Something like facebock.co, lokalgov.biz, onlyflans.au (don't click on any of these btw, are you not even reading?? :) )
• Talk to your IT mob, or your friend you consider to be the most "techy" that you know deep down inside, hates being asked this stuff because what am I your personal IT person? You know I charge people for stuff like this, and you come to me every other day with question, upon question, upon question, c'mon now seriously.... Oops. Sorry.
• Do a bit of research on the company that contacted you. Google them by typing <service company> and "scam" or "sms" and you'll usually get results as to whether what you have received is legitimate or not.

If you follow the above, you should be ok and if you want to know more about me and what we do, Get In Touch!

dEx