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Spam, Scams, Phishing and Cyber Security

I got enough notifications this week on a Facebook page I manage that I thought it was worth posting about for the safety of our clients.

We see a lot of spam and phishing attempts. There are evolving threats and they’re getting better, but the core concept remains the same:

Send enough junk out and hope someone, somewhere falls for it.

I wanted to reiterate a few things scammers are trying to do and remind you it’s always better to be safe than sorry.

The trigger this week were messages on Facebook.

I got a very serious looking messenger notification from pretty convincing-looking profile claiming I was infringing on Trademark and my profile would be permanently deleted unless I clicked on a link to appeal the issue.

The link looked pretty legit, and on a busy day, I may even have been tempted to click the link and dispute the obvious mistake on the trademark.

A client also emailed me this week about a Trademark infringement scam from a company in China claiming they would sue if they didn’t hear from someone about using the same domain name as their manufacturing company in China. This one again, got some attention years ago when a manufacturing client I had contacted me pretty concerned as they were looking to expand into Chinese markets. So we went a bit down the rabbit hole with that one before discovering… scam/spam.

For the acute care home client who operates here in Saskatchewan we didn’t need to show the same concern.
But that’s how these scams work. Like horoscopes – they send out a fairly generic message to thousands and thousands of people and hope it resonates with you enough to forgo common sense and click on unsolicited links.

I am always happy when my clients contact me with questions about potential scams – I appreciate the level of trust in my expertise, and I would much rather take 2 minutes and reassure you that it is not a scam, rather than see you deal with the fallout of cybercrime.