Cyber Fraud – It Happened to Me Last Week

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7 Comments

  1. Maria O'Brien

    Well, Nancy, even though those emails were a “distraction” regarding your email account being hacked, at least it looks like a lot of people “had your back” and were letting you know that there might be a problem. Same thing happened to me last year and I, too, had folks sending me emails regarding the message they had supposedly received from me. I think people are a lot more careful these days about opening any attachments that come with odd requests, even if they are from a known email account. But, as the saying goes, you can’t ever be too careful. My advise is that if you don’t have any business going on with someone whose email you recognize but that is asking you to open an attachment, just delete it and on a separate email let the “real” owner of the email account know that they might have been hacked. Appreciation goes all the way from account holder to receiver.

    1. Maria, thanks for your comment. Good advice.

  2. Wendy Remley

    That is so frightening. I have a great relationship with my escrow officer and lenders, so I hope it would be caught. Reading about this has made me anxious to put some safeguards into place so that it will never happen to my clients.

    Where are you archiving your emails?

    1. Wendy, thanks for your comment. I am “printing to pdf” and archiving on my hard drive, which is secure and backed up.

  3. John Logan

    If not saving email in the Gmail account, where are you saving them?

    1. If the email contains important information, I’m either printing and saving a hard copy, or printing to PDF and saving on my hard drive, which I back up

  4. TJ

    Nancy, Sorry for the delay in getting back to you on this and the trouble this has caused. You’re a significant target due to your role in the Park CIty real estate market. You have access to significant personal data and deal with large financial transactions. There is a ton of good information available online and you’ve already taken one key step which is to use two factor authentication offered by Gmail and most email providers. Here are my top three suggestions:

    1) Change your password to something long and complex. Do not use the same password for anything else. The same rule goes for your online banking, credit card, or other financial sites you utilize. Hackers will compromise websites with less than stellar security, harvest user id/password combinations, and then attempt those combinations on other websites such as gmail, Chase, etc. to see if they get a hit.

    2) Make sure you have Anti-Virus and Malware protection that is up to date.

    3) Be very suspicious of an email from someone you don’t know or don’t expect. Do not click on links or attachments. Always hover above the URL to see if it’s taking you to the site it appears to be.

    I suspect you or Mike were targeted by a Phishing email. It’s the easiest way to compromise a persons machine and it happens a lot more often than people think. Give me a call if you want to talk more!

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