News From The Better Business Bureau on Scammers

WHAT’S HAPPENING TODAY?

Scammers launched a particularly widespread phishing campaign this morning using the BBB brand, and targeting consumers and business owners. Our parent organization, the Council of Better Business Bureaus, is receiving samples of these emails by the hundreds each hour.

The emails claim the recipient’s company has been the subject of a complaint, and asks the recipient to download and complete an attached form. The download, however, is an executable file that plants a nasty virus onto the user’s computer. BBB has heard from a handful of persons who say they inadvertently downloaded the virus and, upon doing so, their system was disabled by “rogueware” that demands payment in order to restore the system to working order. Of course, paying the scammer’s fee won’t fix anything on the computer, and the scammers will then have the victim’s banking information and can swindle the victim even more.  WHAT TO DO IF YOU RECEIVE ONE OF THESE MESSAGES:

Without clicking any link in the message, please forward the email(s) to the BBB’s phishing e-mail box address (phishing@council.bbb.org<mailto:phishing@council.bbb.org>). If you receive a message indicating the email could not be delivered, the BBB team will still manually pull the message from quarantine. You can disregard the block message.

WHAT TO DO IF YOU HAVE CLICKED A LINK IN THE E-MAIL:

Be sure that your anti-virus software has the latest updates from your anti-virus provider and have your anti-virus software run a total system scan on your computer.