Online scams keep getting more creative and scammers committed to their craft. It’s difficult to protect yourself and your organization from fraud and deception. The types of scams that can be perpetrated online are endless and can’t possibly be enumerated here, but two of them have crossed over into Skipjack’s world this week and so we thought we’d better send out a warning to protect our customers and friends. Knowledge is power so read on to understand some of the latest trickery and how to take action if needed.
BlueHost Scam
Many of Skipjack’s clients use BlueHost as their hosting company due to generally positive customer service, reliable hosting and reasonable rates. We’ve written before about the need to ignore the hosting/domain scammers who send notices that you need to renew your hosting even though they aren’t your hosting company. They charge you a ridiculous sum for a domain name when your domain name isn’t even registered with them. We regularly advise clients to know the name of their domain/hosting company and throw away notices that come from someone else.
Well, this week the email came from “BlueHost” directly… at least that’s what it seemed at first glance. One of our clients received an email from an entity pretending to be BlueHost which urged them to click on a link to take action to renew their domain. I told you, they’re crafty. Thankfully, the client was smart enough to be suspicious. This email was definitely NOT from BlueHost.
See screenshot image below:
Here’s Your Sign(s)
Several things jumped out when viewing the email.
1. Logo is squished a bit – unprofessional and BlueHost wouldn’t allow that.
2. “To” address underlined in red above is certainly unrelated to BlueHost.
3. Email refers to a “Blacknight customer”. Obviously, not BlueHost.
4. Capitalization error using “we” to start a sentence. Spelling and punctuation errors are often key indicators of a scammer.
Even so, these are relatively minor things that most people wouldn’t catch so kudos to our client for questioning it.
How to Handle
In the future, the best way to handle this is not to click on ANY links at all in an email such as this, even if you think it is legitimately from your host company. Instead, open a browser window and go directly to login into your account to check and see if there are messages from your host company. Check your recent billing and settings to see if any action is necessary to ensure your domain doesn’t expire.
Online Scams for Inventory
Another client experienced two MAJOR scams in the last two months. Scammers stole their images and videos and pretended to be selling the cars owned by this classic car dealership. Thankfully, the dealer always takes photos of his American muscle and classic cars in front of a brick wall that is the background nearly 100% of the time. This consistency allows regular customers and friends to recognize when they see the photos on other websites.
In this instance, scammers invested significant time, erasing watermarks from photos and editing the dealership’s branded intro/outro out of the videos. The scammers used a template website service meant for legitimate auto dealers to create an easy website and even used black market credit cards ordered in the name of a legitimate dealership.
Since they also steal the name of a legitimate used car dealership when customers look them up on Google, they look like a real dealership. But they aren’t. Most likely, the scammers are somewhere outside the United States. When a customer wires them the money to buy the car, the scammers obviously have no cars to sell and they simply pocket the money and move on. When you’re talking classic cars, you can easily be talking a loss of $25,000 to $90,000 or more – perhaps a life’s savings to buy their dream car.
Staying On Top of Online Scams
Skipjack is helping to protect our client by staying on top of the situation acting quickly on reports of stolen photos and fake websites. We reached out to the maker of the auto templates and reported the problem, asking them to remove the scam website. Thankfully, they were just as concerned and acted immediately to remove the site. They are now sending us any potential customers they are suspicious about to review.
Unfortunately, the scammers also listed the vehicles on CraigsList. Skipjack has reached out to CraigsList multiple times and has not received a response to date. CraigsList users in the Florida Keys, please BEWARE! See screenshot below:
Use Google Lens or Image Search
If you are a company that sells products of any kind, this SCAM can easily apply to you. Try to protect photos as best you can and do regular reviews to see if anyone has stolen them. How to do that?
On your mobile phone, right-click on one of your website images and select Google Lens from the drop-down menu. It will run a search for that specific image looking for other instances online. Make sure you have the Google app downloaded. If you use an Android phone, it should be there by default. If you use an iPhone or iPad, you will need to download the app.
If on a desktop, you can also do an image search on Google. Go to the Google search page and click on Images in the upper right corner. Then, in the search bar, click on the camera icon. This will allow you to upload the image for which you’d like to search.
Once you find one of your product images somewhere it’s not supposed to be, do what you can to get it removed or contact Skipjack Web Services for help. We’ll see if there’s something we can do to help.
Report Online SCAMS
If you find evidence of scams, please help to protect yourself and others by reporting what you find. You can report scams to the Federal Trade Commission by filing a report on their website and to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center.
Here is further information from BlueHost about online scams.
