Brunswick county lost 4 million dollars to a scammer.
The SAME EXACT scam we have warned our users about and have seen in our customer base! This is why you need two factor authentication on email accounts. This is the number one thing you can do to protect yourself right now.
How it happens:
Scammers access your email account via the email providers server – not your computer.
They don’t tell you or leave any evidence that they are monitoring your email – but they are.
They read your email correspondence with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and they wait for something juicy, like a financial transaction – a home buy, a payment, a car etc.
Then, pretending to be you, by using your email account they email the “payer” asking for the payment to be made to a new bank account, their account, not yours.
Since the request comes from the trusted email, (yours) the payer pays a new bank account which belongs to the scammer and you are left still owing the debt in question OR missing your escrow funds.
Is anyone reading your mail? Would you know?
To resolve this:
. Check your account for ‘rules’ that allow forwarding to an email address you don’t recognize. These rules can be within Outlook but much more commonly are going to be “server side” where your mail resides (Google, MSN etc.) So to check this, you log into Google, or Microsoft or AOL or where ever and check there vs Outlook, Windows Mail, Thunderbird or Apple mail. Once your are sure you are “clean”. Then go to the next step.
. Install two factor authentication to keep prying eyes out of your email!
Only if you have two factor authentication can you be sure your email is safe from scammers. Once again, Spectrum does not offer this service so don’t bother searching for it. Customers with ec.rr.com as an active email address are basically leaving the car with doors unlocked and keys in the ignition. It’s a crime waiting to happen.