Social media makes it easy for someone to pretend to be something they’re not.  There’s enough info on your linked in, facebook and twitter profile for someone to try to email people at your out of home company pretending to be you.  Artificial intelligence and bots make it even easier to try to impersonate you.

Billboard Insider publisher Dave Westburg occasionally gets emails from people he supposedly knows which say “Here are the pics you wanted” or “I think you’ll like this.”  The attached file is spyware.  If you hover over the name in the sender it isn’t the person Dave knows.  It’s a another email address.  It’s a trap for the unwary.

Jonathan Trilleras recently caught someone on trying to pose as an employee at his company on LinkedIn

Some thoughts on how to protect yourself and your out of home company from scams.

• Never, never open unsolicited files and make sure employees never, never open unsolicited files.  They could be spyware.  If you didn’t ask for it, call the person on the phone or email them separately (not by replying to the original email) to ask if they sent you something.
• Buy an antivirus program and scan your computer once a day.  Billboard Insider swears by Bitdefender Antivirus for Mac.  It catches and quarantines malware emails.
• Be careful who you connect to on linked in.  Someone who connects with you can immediately connect and attempt to scam any of your contacts.
• Use a gmail address for the public domain and only disclose your actual company.com email to people you do business with.  That way the webcrawlers will only have a low value gmail address to target.
• Invest in a good firewall and antivirus program to screen scam emails.
• Make sure the your sensitive email address is nowhere in the public domain.  If noone knows your email they can’t try an email scam.  This isn’t reasonable for a public figure or a someone in business.  You want to be visible.  But you can hide from public view the email which is attached to your bank accounts, travel accounts, ebay, amazon…

What do you do to protect your company from scams?   Email davewestburg@billboardinsider.com or use the contact form below.’