WARNING – PHISHING EMAIL SCAM ALERT!!
There’s a new phishing scam coming to an email box near you . . .
I cover the details in this video and help you uncover the secrets to not falling prey.
https://youtu.be/-m-vIRXOFJE
Transcript
Hi, today I want to talk to you about a new phishing scam that you’ve likely seen in your email, or one that you’ll see soon, and how I recommend you deal with it.
Hi, I’m Jonathan with Valorous Circle and today I want to talk to you about a new phishing scam that’s likely to show up in your email box, if you haven’t seen it already.
When I talk phishing, I’m not talking about in a lake, as in trying to catch fake, but phishing spelled P-H-I-S-H-I-N-G. This is an email scam that typically comes around and has a link in the email, and due to the messaging, that they encourage you to click on, and when you click on that, bad things happen. It could be as simple as your email passwords being stolen, it could be software, like key loggers or malware being installed, or a host of other things like viruses being installed. In either case, when you see a phishing scam, you want to avoid it. And today, I want to talk to you about a specific one that’s being going around that I’ve been seeing from some of my clients recently.
That phishing scam is simply you get an email, and it says in the email that you are using licensed images from another photographer on your website and that they demand you take care of them immediately, or remove them immediately. I’ll show you a sample of one of these emails here so we can take a quick look at it. This is the actual text from one that just came through this morning.
So, it says:
“Hi,
This is Melika and I’m a qualified photographer.
I was discouraged, frankly speaking, when I found my images at your web-site. If you use a copyrighted image without an owner’s consent, you should be aware that you could be sued by the creator.
It’s again the law to use stolen images and it’s so wicked!
Take a look at this document with links to my images you used at…”
and I blanked it out, but your website URL will appear here,
“and my earlier publications to obtain the evidence of my copyrights.
Download it right now and check this out for yourself:”
And you can see there is a Google link. Do not – DO NOT – click on this Google link. Then they continue on with:
“If you don’t get rid of the images mentioned in the file above during the next couple of days, I’ll file a complaint against you to your hosting provider stating that my copyrights have been severely infringed and I am trying to protect my intellectual property.
And if it doesn’t help, trust me I am going to take legal action against you! And I will not bother myself to let you know of it in advance.”
Wow, what a nice guy, or gal in this case, I guess we don’t know. First tip-offs, and this is obviously, it’s not particularly well-written, and so you can be rest-assured this is not coming from any law offices, or likely, in this case, even a photographer in the United States.
Secondarily, as you read through this, the entire objective of this email is to get you to click on this Google link, to make you feel seem fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and hopefully go, “Well, let me click on this link and see what this is all about.” I admit I haven’t clicked on this link, but just from looking at it, it appears that it’s a direct link to a file on a Google drive. That file does not appear to be a PDF or anything of the sort. In fact, it’s probably a virus file or some installer that’s going to install something nefarious on your computer if you click on it.
In this case, I recommended to the client something very simple. Now, I want you to know here, this is not legal advice; I am not an attorney and Valorous Circle is not a law firm. But based on this and based on what we’ve seen, I simply asked the client two simple questions:
- Do you know this person?
And the answer was no, we don’t. And,
- Do you believe that the images on your website have been appropriately licensed?
And in this case, the customer was able to confirm that yes, indeed, every image on their website, to the best of their knowledge, had been licensed appropriately. Based on that, I said they had a couple options. One, they could simply ignore it if they wanted to. By the way, this came from an AOL email address, not typically the kind of thing you’re going to see from a professional either. I said you can either ignore it, or if you want to respond, feel free to respond letting them know that to the best of your knowledge, all those images on your site are appropriately licensed, and due to the security policies in place at your company, you’re not allowed to click on any link from an unauthorized third party, and therefore that you would welcome them to submit proof of their claim, but they should send it through US Postal Mail and send it to you at your corporate or office address, to your attention.
Why do I do this? Well, again, I am not an attorney, this is not legal advice. If you’re really concerned about this being legitimate, I would contact your law firm or your attorney. In this case, assuming you’re not concerned about it, and you want them to go away, this should do it. Most scammers are not going to send you anything in the mail, that would be mail fraud and they don’t want to go there. And they’re going to just simply ignore you and go for the next low hanging fruit, so to speak, or the next easy catch that was dumb enough to click on their link.
We’ve all been there, we’ve all be in receipt of emails, or things like that that makes us go, “Uh oh!” and maybe want to click on that link. Don’t feel bad if you’ve been there, but please, teach yourself not to click on any links in any email that you receive from someone you don’t know. And if you’re ever in question, contact that person and find out a better way to get that, maybe by talking to them in person or meeting with them or whatever the case may be. Make sure that those links you get via email are from trusted sources.
I hope this is helpful. If you’ve gotten this phishing scam, I’d love to hear about it in the comments, or if you’ve seen different variations of this, again, let’s share it with each other so we can help each other avoid these phishing scams and avoid having our computers get infected.
I’m Jonathan with Valorous Circle, and please make it a great day.
