How to Easily Spot a Fake and Fraudulent Email
To mark Safer Internet Day 2023 (7th Feb), I felt a strong need to revisit the age-old bugbear of many businesses - scam emails. To this day, fake & fraudulent emails are still a major problem for many business owners, bookkeepers and accountants. With the general public being much more aware of fake emails nowadays, I naively thought the notion of people being duped by spam emails was a thing of the past. However, a recent article on Facebook highlighted the severity of the problem in all industries, including mine. The conversation started on Facebook…
“OMG I have just paid £25k on behalf of a client and just found out it was a fictitious company....”
It is common for accountants to make payments on behalf of their clients. In this instance, the accountant in question received an email which looked genuine and requested payment. The scammers found the accountancy firm’s email address on their website (which wasn’t too difficult). The accountant made the payment and was obviously mortified that it was a fake email. They are currently waiting to see if the bank can recover the money.
What concerned me the most about this story was that it wasn’t an isolated incident. From reviewing the comments on the post, it appears that many other accountants and businesses have also been duped! It's clearly a common problem at this point. Here are some more examples:
- Scammers have been hacking and intercepting emails and changing bank details
- Fake invoices have been sent from genuine-looking companies that the recipient is aware of
- Arrow Inc lost $13m after a fraudster posed as a company executive and transferred money from the corporate bank account to an external one
- Even Google and Facebook have been targeted and they have now improved their internal systems to make sure it doesn't happen again
How you can spot a fake email
It is increasingly important that you and your team are aware of the severity of spam emails. Fraudulent emails are becoming more and more sophisticated and it is important that your team can spot them. Questions you should ask yourself include:
- Is it from a genuine email address?
- Does it have any spelling and/or grammatical mistakes?
- Does it ask for personal information?
- Does the branding look legitimate?
- Does the linked website or any hyperlinks look legitimate? (hover your mouse over the hyperlink to see the true URL address appear. If it's different from the address that appears in the email, you have good reason to be suspicious)
Learn more about how to spot an email scam. I also advise that, regarding payments, if the total sum being asked of you to be sent over is above a certain amount, you should update your internal processes to get the payment authorised by two people. You ultimately want to be 100 per cent certain that the email you're responding to is genuine.
Fraudulent emails from HMRC
In addition to generic email fraud; we have had situations where our clients have been duped by emails that they thought were from HMRC. In this scenario, we have a separate article worth taking a look at: Beware of Fraudulent Emails “From HMRC”. This article covers everything you need to look out for when receiving an email allegedly from HMRC.
If you have any further questions or wish to speak to someone, please feel free to email me at lee.manning@raffingers.co.uk or click here to get in touch.