[ Home ]

Protect yourself from fraudulent (spoof) email

The definition of a spoof email is when an email is sent to you, by a business such as Trustworks; to try and extract certain personal information from you for their own use.  They will then use this information for their own personal use such as identity fraud.  You must be extra careful when dealing with these emails, and there are certain key falsehoods in a spoof email.

Ways to identify a spoof:

1. They start with a general greeting, which normally would be specific to each customer.  Look for emails that start with “TrustWorks customers” or “To whom it may concern” or “Dear customer”.
2. They will also try and initiate a false sense of urgency, which a normal company would not try and do.  These spoof emails try and make you think that you have to make a decision quickly and give you false deadlines to redeem your account or any give other information that may compromise your account.
3. Another way to identify a spoof email is a link that is provided that links you to a page with false information.  Be aware of these links, as they may ask you for information that you should not have to provide to us, such as bank account numbers, drivers license and/or passwords.  Check the link before you click on it, if you are unsure in any way check it out before linking to it and entering any person information. Be wary that the link may even have “TrustWorks” in the link.
4. If you sense that someone is spoofing you through TrustWorks, please let us know immediately so we can deal with it.

The best way to avoid spoofing is to educate yourself on the process and what to do to avoid it.  Spoofing can happen from any number of companies, avoid responding to the email directly, call the company or go to the original site.  As well as if you don’t know the companies avoid the email all together.  Look for grammatical errors, or spelling mistakes in the email, this is a good way to see if it’s a fake.

Ensure that all your anti-virus and browser software are up-to-date. Or you should consider installing firewall, anti-spam, and anti-spy-ware software. Report incidents of spoofing to your ISP, the website or web-hosting company and the Anti-spoofing company.

Group at: reportphishing@antiphishing.org.

Learn more at: www.antiphishing.org

Send mail to yoram@trustworks.ca with questions or comments about this web site.