[vc_row][vc_column width=”2/3″][vc_column_text]You didn’t have to be an Amazon Prime Customer to be on the receiving end of the recent spate of fraudulent emails purporting to be from Amazon and offering the recipient an e-Reward worth US $60. They inundated our inboxes and sadly far too many of us may have clicked on the links — and — and all of the links in the emails sent us to the same place, a website designed by a cyber-criminal as a watering-hole – a place to get the unsuspecting to visit and while they are there cause malware (malicious software) to be loaded onto the visitor’s devices.

We’ve posted an example that we received from these cyber-criminals over the course of the past three weeks (beginning 22 December and continuing through today (09 January). We no doubt will be receiving many more of these jewels in the days to come.  To see the example, click on the image to the right —>

What are the areas circled in red in this diagram?

We’ve circled in red the four separate areas within the email which the cyber criminal provided to the recipient to click – think of these as the criminals fishing hooks (to root of the term Phish).  Any of these four sent you to the same undesirable website – even though a different website’s URL was present.

What about that lousy spelling and punctuation, isn’t that a dead give-away that this is a piece of cyber trash? It is indeed, and those of you who are recognize this are ahead of the game, and the more sophisticated cyber criminals always insert spelling and other obvious grammatical errors into their emails. Why? So that those of you who are well-schooled in identifying the email as “trouble: will self-select out and those who aren’t as knowledgable will be the only ones engaging the criminals.

How can I avoid being a recipient of fraudulent email?

You can never share your email with a vendor or website. That is largely impractical. That said, you can use a throw-away, web-based email address for those websites who you are required to register but do not wish to have an ongoing relationship, which will reduce the number of emails heading to your inbox from the “spammers” and cyber criminals.

How did they harvest our email address?

In this instance, we watched the email harvesting occur, two days prior to the arrival of the first email of this type. A legitimate business entity in India which advertised its services to “scrape” websites (definition: to scrape a website is to visit and capture in a methodical manner the pages of a website and their content) visited our Red Folder website (https://redfolder.co) and when the scraper arrived at our contact page, they harvested the email address.

What can you do?

  1. Adopt an individual policy of not clicking on links in emails from entities which you are not familiar, and be cautious about those with whom you are.
  2. Make sure your anti-virus application software is up-to-date
  3. Share this warning with all of our friends and family members who may be less aware of how cyber criminals operate.
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