Web Marketing Scam Alert - 07/15/2018

For our business, it's hard enough to keep up with all the legitimate billing that comes in, but then there's the straight up impersonation, shakedown email scams like the one above. In this case, the scammer is trying to get me to click through and give them my credit card info, for fear that not doing so will result in people not finding my website in search. We'll take a look at how you can tell this is a scam, and then talk about some ideas for speeding up the process of identifying and eliminating these from your returning to your email inbox.

Whenever anybody emails either all in capital letters, using red letters, or starting out with how important it is, I already have my shields up.  But if it's that important, how come they don't even mention their company's name? Letterhead, while a hold-over from paper billing days, still adds legitimacy to an email. The scammer leaves that out, choosing not to identify themselves by name, or even phone number and instead focuses on a threat to something familiar, mentioning my domain name 8 times during the email. In fact, there is not a single bit of contact info on this email at all.

What makes this even more difficult for people is that domain registration is a bill that only comes due once a year or more, not once a month, which makes the charge look a lot less familiar than a light bill or insurance bill. Also, the scammer throws around words that for many are important and somewhat familiar, but not totally understood like "SEO" and "domain registration," but if you read carefully, they don't actually provide either of those.

Could a four digit zip code be just human error? Of course. However, it's worth noting that a four digit zip code is usually the result of someone pulling a database of contact names into an Excel spreadsheet, in which the default "General" format truncates leading zeros in numeric values. Thus "03896" becomes "3896."  That's just the beginning however. As you read through this email, you will notice many grammatical blunders, which are very common in scam emails, such as missing words, typos, inappropriate verb tense, misplaced modifiers and punctuation errors. Whenever you see that level of sloppy in an email, it should raise a flag.

Finally at the bottom of the page in the fine print are the two things that make this clearly a scam.
It says: 
"This is not a bill. You are dont (love that syntax) need to pay the amount unless you accept this notification"
and
"We do not directly register or renew domain names."

So it's not a bill, and also they don't actually register any domains. Their "important message" is remind us to pay $86 annually to "register your domain for search engine optimization submission," which is wholly unnecessary according to Google because their algorithm crawls the web for new websites regularly and automatically submits them to their index. If by some weird chance you do not find your website on Google search, adding your website to Google's index is very easy and is a free item you can do yourself, and you only need do it once, not every year, and certainly not for $86 dollars a year.

Here's how we prepare to avoid email scams:

• Know what you are looking at. If it's unfamiliar and you can't even identify the company, it's likely a scam. 
  
• No contact info, no logo - What business does not put a phone number in their email? SCAM!
• We keep a spreadsheet of legitimate suppliers which includes:  Business name, business address, contact phone, product or service name, account number, fee schedule, expiration date. That way, if someone claims it's time to renew and we're unsure, we can see that we already have another legitimate company that does that for us. If we're still unsure, we can call the provider of whatever it is and ask what this is about.
• Whatever you do, don't click any link in a scam email, not even the "unsubscribe" link because it could be a link to a virus or some other malicious java code, malware, ransomware, etc that could lock up your computer.

• Report the scam email to the Federal Trade Commission, and your email provider as SPAM. Most email clients have a way for you to mark the email as SPAM, and then you can report them to the FTC as well. To learn more about dealing with SPAM email, https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0038-spam
• Lastly, you can ask us! email your scams to: info@busystreetmarketing.com and we will investigate it for free!