Several of our clients have recently received some rather more convincing email scams lately, reporting to be from a member of our team and about a topic that’s potentially plausible. Normally something relating to either hosting or a content management system upgrade. There’s a cost attached to the proposed work, and the emails have a footer that looks a little bit like our actual email signatures.
These emails are absolutely not from our team – thankfully our customers appear to be on the ball and have reached out to confirm the source of the emails.
Take a look at an example scam email below, here’s what should alert your suspicion:
- Email address: Most obviously, this email comes from mail.darkcherrycreative.co.uk@gmail.com, a free Gmail account rather than an official email @darkcherrycreative.co.uk address. Our team will only ever contact you from company email addresses, never an unsolicited Gmail address.
- Footer: This is completely different to the footer found on our emails that you’ll be familiar with, the fonts are wrong, the image is different and it’s just generally a bit messy. Also note that the same Gmail address is listed in the footer.
- Topic: We’ve emailed you and asked for an unexpected value for work you weren’t expecting. We’re a friendly a personable team with great relationships with our clients, we don’t tend to send unexpected emails asking for payment for a service we’ve not discussed with you.
- Invoices: As a client, you’ll be familiar with our invoicing system, invoices have a consistent layout and are either paid directly through the payment portal provided (via card) or via BACS into our account. As a client you’ll already have our bank details. If we ever change these we’ll have informed you of it well in advance.
- Language used: This email is clearly AI generated and reads as such, as a client you’ll be familiar with the sort of correspondence you received from us, we don’t send cold and robotic emails.
- Kind regards AND warm regards: We’ll pick one of these, no need for both! We like to think we’ve got a rather good grasp of spelling and grammar.
If you receive an email of this nature, do please get in touch with our team and let us know. Don’t reply to the messages or click any links of the email if it looks suspicious. Either pick up the phone and give us a call using the number on our website or create a new email message and send an email to your usual contact, not the one on the suspicious email.
With the proliferation of AI, scams like this are going to become far more common so it’s more important than ever to be vigilant.
This scam is the combination of a phishing style free email address, and an AI bot going through our website portfolio. The bot has then looked up contact details on client websites, then even built a plausible looking footer from looking at our LinkedIn page. Far more sophisticated than an email pretending to be from a rich Sultan that wants to send you thousands of pounds but needs to bill you a handling fee in advance.
Please get in touch with our team if you’ve seen suspicious looking emails that look like they could be from Dark Cherry, the last thing we want to see is one of our clients getting fooled by a scam of this nature.
The scam email:
