Email Scams Aren’t As Obvious As They Used To Be: Even cyber security experts are falling into the trap

Almost everyone using the internet receives spam mails every once in a while, these emails are often sent in order to get your bank details or to make you send in some money into the scammer’s bank account. But with rising awareness, people often just laugh at these emails and delete them.

Rising awareness has caused the old methods of email scamming to become obsolete and now email scammers have also stepped up their game. Understanding the importance of personalization, scammers are now tailoring each email in a manner which makes it seem completely believable and even the best cyber security experts are failing to detect it.

What these scammers do is that they first select a target, and gather important information about their target. Supposing that target is you; they’d start off by visiting your profiles on different social media platforms. Here they will try and find a professional relation that’s important to you.

Once they find a professional relation of a higher hierarchy, they create a duplicate email account and then write you a decisive email. This email can include them asking you for a work payment, or just a random favor such as buying them a gift card.

Why This System Works?

Being ambitious, humans always want to excel at their professional life, and what other way to do it than forming great relationships with people that are on better positions than you? Using this desire to their advantage, scammers often tend to act as people that are on higher positions than you.

When acting as higher ups, scammers do not have to go through a lot company information and structure, since they simply ask you for small favors that obviously any one would do for a boss or mentor.

How to Save Yourself from these Scams

As soon as you detect a scam email in your inbox, the first measure you should take is ‘not replying’ to the email, even if you intend to do it as a joke. This is because replying to the scam email will make your email address vulnerable to more such spam emails therefore increasing your probability of falling for these scams.

The next thing you can do to is to always check the header details of the emails you receive, while checking the header details make sure to check things like the email address and if you find that its a different one, then there are high chances that the email is a scam.

Lastly we would suggest you always think before reacting to any email, and if something in the email just doesn’t fit right with your common sense, then take necessary precautions.