Beware – Hackers at Work

There has been another case in Audlem of e-mails apparently coming from a known and respected person asking for financial help in some way or another.

It used to be a plea from somebody apparently stranded in an out-of-the-way foreign location who needed a friend to pay some cash into an account urgently.

Since the pandemic has made this scenario unlikely, the latest ruse is to ask for the "friend" to purchase an Amazon voucher and then give the voucher number to the sender of the e-mail (who is pretending to be your friend). No doubt in this case the criminal (and that is what they are) will use the voucher number to cash the money and disappear over the horizon.

This is done by hacking into the mail system used by the person to obtain a list of their e-mail contacts. An e-mail is then sent to all the people on the list and the replies intercepted.

The criminal tries to make the fake e-mail sound convincing, but usually it is fairly easy to spot that it doesn't sound like the person you know.

But the over-riding rule is to be very, very careful of any e-mail, however genuine it sounds, which suggests that you send money to anywhere that you weren't planning to anyway.

If the hacking of your e-mail address list happens to you, you will probably find out quite quickly because you will receive some puzzled e-mails from friends who "smell a rat". You need to notify your mail provider and send an e-mail to all your contacts telling them about the event and asking them to ignore the offending e-mail.