Forged Email Messages

Many of us continue to receive forged email messages appearing to be from someone at EMU. I am confident that we are not about to let the senders steal the money they are after, but they have been successful in stealing our time.

How can we avoid this?

While there are some preventive actions we can take after an incident has occurred, we do not have tools that are effective in proactively blocking all fake identities these scammers might come up with that appear to be individuals at EMU. Despite advances in artificial intelligence, it is still very hard to make a computer system work like our brains do when we see one thing that to us might resemble another.

So what should you do?

1.  Don't reply.  But if you do by mistake, it's not a terrible thing.  You'll just get another reply from the scammer that should be even more obviously bogus than the first.  But it's best not to engage the scammers at all.  When we do, it only encourages them to keep trying.

2.  In Gmail, you can click the hexagonal exclamation mark icon to report the message to Google as spam.

3.  DELETE the message and move on to the next!  Anything else is time lost forever.  Do not waste a second more.

The most effective solution involves your discernment and your delete button.