PPB April 2019

Scammers Vs. The Promo Industry It’s risky out there. Here’s how to protect your business from email scams. by Chris Morrissey W e’ve all seen them—email quote requests that come out of nowhere from a contact you have never met, representing a company you’ve never heard of from a location where you don’t even have a presence. Until recently these requests were easy to identify because of their improper use of English and frequent misspellings, but in the past six months scammers have located the spell-check button and are adding features to their emails designed to lower your defenses and create a basic level of trust. If fooled, the result isn’t just the loss of data, but the potential loss of your entire business. While email scams have been going on for many years now, it wasn’t until several months ago that scammers began to make significant changes to the methods being used. The way they are requesting products is changing and scam emails aren’t always easy to identify. For example, scammers have added email signatures with U.S.-based phone numbers and addresses and have even built legitimate-looking websites to fool you. If the scammers get a distributor on the hook, they will even go so far as to give you pre-payment for their order via a credit card. After all, who’s going to suspect they are being hustled when thousands of dollars have just been deposited into their bank account? 62 | APRIL 2019 | THINK