There are some common patterns in scam emails and texts that you can use to identify them and take proper action. Some examples of these patterns are detailed below. In most cases, you can simply ignore the email/text, and block the sender. Of course, if you are ever unsure whether an email or anything is legitimate, you can always feel free to reach out to IT and we will be able to clarify that for you. It's better to be safe than sorry.

• Check the "From: " email address
  • This is the first thing you should do, and will usually tell you immediately whether it is a scam or not. An email address can have any name associated with it, which is why you need to check the email address itself.
  • Check for any misspellings, or the domain (what comes after the @ in the email address). Within SPCC, every email should be coming from an @spcc-roch.org address, or from a provider/vendor domain. If you receive a request from an email address outside of SPCC, then this should raise some red flags.

• Language used in the email/text message
  • Many of these scammers are not based in the US, and therefore have you buy gift cards so they can redeem them and use them overseas without being tracked or refunded. Due to this, there may be some grammatical or spelling errors, or some uncommonly-used words such as "kindly" or "needful."
  • If you know the person who is supposedly contacting you and it does not sound like they would have written that, then this should also raise some red flags. You can reach out directly to that person through a different way that you know for sure is them, such as a new email directly to their SPCC email address or phone number.
  • Scammer requests will usually be extremely vague, with not much detail about the request or why they need it. An example is below. You can see how this request is extremely generic and can be applied to anyone and anything.

Kindly email me your mobile number promptly. An urgent executive meeting is about to happen, and I require your assistance. Appreciate your quick reply.

• What is being requested
  • As stated above, scammers will usually ask you to buy them gift cards and send the codes to them. This is not something that someone with SPCC should ever have you do, especially on short notice. As soon as you see anything to do with a gift card, you should be suspicious unless it was previously planned out.
  • They may also ask for your credentials. You should never tell anyone your password, even if they ask for it. IT will never ask you for your password.

• Circumstances around contacting you
  • Is there anything happening, such as an event, that might cause this person to be contacting you? Would you normally be the person to contact for this type of thing?
  • The latest scam notification we received was initiated from a cold email talking about an "executive meeting", into moving on to text messaging. If you do not recognize an email address or phone number, then this should raise some alarms, as well as if this person does not normally contact you for this type of thing. If someone claiming to be IT reaches out to you unprompted, this should also be suspicious.