One of West Africa Weekly’s reporter on Monday, August 26, received a phishing e-mail from one “Anitha Jacobs” who want a donation to the needy to be distributed through the recipient.
The suspicious email starts out friendly with “Hello dear, how are you doing?”, an attempt to be personal and build trust. It then asks you to get in touch for more information about the donation, indicating a classic phishing tactic of false promises of money to obtain details.
According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), a phishing email is a fraudulent attempt to obtain sensitive information, such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details, by disguising as a trustworthy source in electronic communication.
While this particular email did not contain links to fake websites that mimic legitimate ones to deceive recipients into providing their personal information, it did bank on emotions and indicated a sense of quick call to action to trick the receiver to act as told without thinking critically.
West Africa Weekly gathered that the sender of the suspicious had been flagged as phishing mail by SureLock, an IT security firm in The Netherlands.
While SureLock warned its customers and the public in general to be aware of phishing mails like this, using the ‘view or show original’ option revealed other email address: “[email protected]”, and “[email protected]”, a return path most likely to be the originating sender hiding under the fictitious name of “Anitha Jacobs.”
As underlined in the image above, West Africa Weekly can confirm the sender had used VPN to conceal the originating IP address that could potentially reveal the scammer’s location.
Meanwhile, as a disclaimer, whoever “Anitha Jacobs” is, simply want personal information and financial records of any publicly available e-mail address, hence the phishing attacks.
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