How to Prevent, Detect, and Disarm Attacks Targeting Your Email Account

You (Electronic Fraudster) Ain’t Nothin’ but a Hound Dog.

Armand, the RPost brand ambassador armadillo, here, coming to you from lovely Memphis, the birthplace of rock-and-roll and the locale for the late King of Rock’s family home, which has been in the news recently for all sorts of bad reasons.

In a new low for electronic fraudsters, Graceland, Elvis’ home, has been the subject of a scam that has put the King’s legendary house in jeopardy of foreclosure. This one hits particularly hard because yours truly took a family vacation to Graceland when he was just an Armadillo pup. Visiting Graceland is an American rite of passage, and to think that it could have been stripped from us all makes my scales stand up.

The impostor scam involved clever email lures, fake notaries, shell companies, and impostors who do this sort of thing for sport (and riches). This is an offshoot of today’s widespread “vacant lot” fraud where impostors sell vacant lots that they don’t own.

Here, the fraudsters, who purport to be from Nigeria (but who really knows), told a New York Times reporter that they mostly prey on unsuspecting and/or elderly people in Florida and California. Some of their victims are already dead. They comb birth and death certificates and other electronic documents to glean private information used to fabricate loan documents that put legitimate property up for collateral. The bogus loans obviously do not get paid off and then collateral property is targeted. 

In this specific case, a shady lender (a shell company formed by the fraudsters) claimed that Lisa Marie Presley, Elvis’ now deceased only child, took out a $3.8 million loan with them and used Graceland as collateral. The scammers claimed Lisa Marie never paid the loan money back, so they moved to recoup the alleged losses by auctioning the property.

Elvis’ granddaughter later claimed the loan agreement was based on forged documents and a fake shell company and asked a court for an injunction to stop the sale. The aforementioned shady lender would later withdraw any claims to the property, and Graceland seems for now to be safe. 

It now appears that this was in essence a PR stunt by the scammers, a show of bravado not unlike the “Yahoo Boys” we described to you earlier. You will recall that these scammers love to show off how easy it is for them to use software to initiate or join a web video meeting looking and sounding as if they were YOU (or anyone else for that matter) in order to scam people out of money. The scary thing is that the steps used here in the Graceland episode are much easier to pull off than what the Yahoo Boys do. Forget about deepfake software and AI emulators, all that was needed to nearly foreclose on Elvis’ home was some fake emails and forgeries.

So now I must reiterate the importance of having RPost’s PRE-Crime analytical AI security module, as it can provide a low-cost, highly effective weapon in today’s cyberscam arms race. Our PRE-Crime™ module is designed to prevent, detect, and disarm impostor attacks targeting you at your own email account (and even at your clients’). It extends peace-of-mind beyond your organization to your entire network of email recipients including their reply and forward recipients.

Simply put, it is essential. 

We here believe that this whole Graceland mishegoss would never have happened (or at least gone to court) had the victims been using RMail.

To learn more about Email Eavesdropping™ and PRE-Crime protection, please contact us to learn more. And let’s all be thankful that Graceland is still in the hands of us Elvis fans.

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