Symptoms or Request:
This is an example of a phishing email posing as a fake offer.
Explanation:
One of the most prevalent types of email fraud comes of the form of offers that are too good to be true. The fraudulent offer typically features a popular item or service, at a drastically reduced price. Most of these are just an attempt to get your credit card information and if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. Another type of bogus offer affects people who use Ebay, Craigslist, or any other online retailer for selling their belongings. The typical scam is that a person will contact you offering to pay the full amount, or even more for a rush delivery, but they refuse to pay you until they receive the item for inspection or some other reason.
There are a couple of initial red flags just after reading the email, even without further investigating:
- Sender's Email Address
- The email address references a legitimate company but that is not the companies email address..
- Recipient Email Address
- The email address that the email is being sent to is not our email.
- Grammatical errors
- The email has very obvious grammar errors that help identify it.
- Formatting
- The format of the email looks very basic and unprofessional.
Solution:
Report the phishing attempt by attaching the original e-mail. Directions for specific e-mail clients can be found from the KB article below, and are linked as "related articles.
https://oregonstate.teamdynamix.com/TDClient/1935/Portal/KB/ArticleDet?ID=80695
Once you have submitted the phishing attempt and it is processed the sender's email will be added to our block list and they should be unable to send a phishing attempt from that email account again.
For assistance, contact the IS Service Desk.