COVINGTON, Ga. — Residents and businesses have fallen victim to financial scams in recent months, and the city police department wants to help raise awareness of the issue “phishing” and “spoofing.”
Lt. Brent Fuesting, of the Covington Police Department, said the department has received many reports within the last six months of people being scammed out of several hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“Usually, people doing these scams typically just target the elderly,” Fuesting said. “But in the last six months, there have probably been about seven local businesses to fall victim to scams, losing a total of about $750,000.”
Fuesting said those have typically been smaller businesses, where losing $100,000 on such scams “really hurts.”
Businesses are typically attacked through a strategy called “email spoofing,” Fuesting said, where the scammer tricks users into thinking a message came from a person or entity they either know or can trust. Fuesting said this is done by scammers making subtle changes like “forging email headers so the client software displays the fraudulent sender address, which most users take at face value.” For example, a scammer could take an address like “send@email.com” and make one change, like turning the letter “o” to a zero, becoming “send@email.c0m” — a change that would likely go unnoticed to the average email user.
To help combat the issue and help others avoid becoming a victim of scamming, Fuesting…
