Beware Holiday Scams

welcome back to another episode of cappuccino chat this time we're talking about holiday scams and what to be on the lookout for so here it is december and it's almost christmas and of course the holiday scams and fishing attempts and all the other garbage that comes along with the holidays filling up our inboxes again it's all here yes they're still at it it's even worse than it was before with all of the supply chain hold ups and things waiting they're going to attack even more so again everybody knows things are hard to get everything's delayed so when you get those emails from your online retailer that you may have bought those last minute christmas gifts from be careful just clicking links in email we're all going to be in a hurry we're all going to be worried about those packages showing up on time even at our office when we're ordering supplies and things for the office you know we're worried about these things getting there on time things are delayed be careful when you get those links what i suggest is if you get a email from say amazon and it says your package has been delayed or there's an issue with it don't click anything inside the email okay what i want you to do is go to your web browser chrome edge whatever you might be using and go to amazon direct log into your account on your computer and then look for that order and see what it says in there because if it's a true issue it will show up once you log into the portal if it's a scam that email is going to be of course a scam so you're not going to want to click on anything in there because they're going to try to steal your credentials other information etc etc there's normally some dead giveaways to these scam emails so let's go through some of those so the first one is incorrect spelling and grammar so again you're going to see just the grammar or the flow of the emails don't work very well and uh it doesn't make too much sense it's not normal english it's because they're coming from overseas and they're trying to do their best a lot of times to uh imitate how we write so fake email addresses stuff coming from gmail.com when it says amazon so again you get that amazon email but it's coming from some gmail account or watch for the spelling of amazon they may have misspelled amazon right they may have put a um a zero in there instead of an o or things of that nature strange attachments and invoice attachments i still get these it comes through it's hilarious these people hey here's your invoice for that package on i think it's a dell computer they tried sending me on um from some site and here's the invoice it's like okay i didn't do it i know to delete it but be careful of those invoices and other weird attachments taking you different places shipping information delays problems already talked about that make sure you don't click inside the email to get those any links that require you to log in these can be fake and trying to get your username and password so again any of those links if you do click on one just because you're in a hurry and you forget and then all of a sudden it asks you to log in that could be a dead giveaway be careful kind of stop right there close that out and go to the website yourself and try to log in we've got a new product we're looking at rolling out to our clients to kind of help defend against these fake logins i'm telling you right now there's a lot of good art people out there just making websites look like office 365 logins and you get the prompts and it's really not them and they're trying to steal your credentials same thing for amazon we've got the product running here at the office and it's catching things all the time for fake requests for logging in for this and do this and do that so downloads from dropbox onedrive those kinds of things again be wary of those links unless you were expecting it so if your cpa is sending you something and they've told you hey be on the lookout for my link coming from me well then of course it is more than likely okay but if you're not expecting those types of things do not click on them do not download anything don't go there don't get those these are some of the different ways that some of these fishing and scam things are going on especially for the holidays so just you know be be weary about this stuff be on guard just because of everything that's going on with the shipping delays and the supply chain and just the normal holiday stuff stuff's even more crazy than it has been in years past because of that so please please just take an extra glance when you get those emails before you go clicking on anything and as always if you have any questions or concerns if you're a client of ours and you get some of those emails and you're just not quite sure reach out to us we'll take a look at them for you and just make sure we always want to double check and make sure things are good and again when in doubt pick up the phone and call the person that sent you don't reply back to the email because if their email was compromised the person that compromised it would reply to you all right begin if you need anything please reach out and get a hold of me you can call the office at 760-7700