With Email Eavesdropping Alerts, You Will Know When You or Your Clients are Being Drawn into Email Schemes

With Email Eavesdropping Alerts, You Will Know When You or Your Clients are Being Drawn into Email Schemes

June 30, 2023 / in Blog / by Zafar Khan, RPost CEO

A blissful way to counter payment paranoia.

Last week we touched on how great it would be if you no longer had to suffer through “Password Pause” whenever you had to send out sensitive login info via email. As we mentioned, the cure for Password Pause is RMail’s Disappearing Ink™ feature.

Now there’s another common syndrome in the working world that I’d like to shed a light on: “Payment Paranoia”. Has this ever happened to you? You’re about to hit “send” on an email approving a very large sum to be transferred from your company’s bank account to an external vendor, say, Ralph’s Flower Arrangements and IT Services. 

But here’s the thing: You know there’s a Ralph you work with, and you know that you have a flower vendor, and you know that you use an IT consultancy, but are they all under the same roof? You call the vendor’s number and get a voicemail, but it’s after 5pm. This is a “Net 30” vendor, and it’s day 30 right now. Not hitting send could cost you a pretty big discount.

Somewhere in the back of your mind, you’re recalling a brilliantly written blog article about an email eavesdropping scam where…

  1. Somebody sends an ordinary email to a client or customer about a payment due (invoice, purchase order, etc.). 
  2. The recipient’s email account is being unknowingly eavesdropped on by a cybercriminal using a discovered reused password and IMAP protocol at their server, for example. 
  3. Within hours of the email going to your recipient, if the email is contemplating a payment, the cybercriminal copies only that email content (often including PDF payment details for a wire or ACH) and changes only one thing—the account where the money is to be sent! 

Disaster ensues, the money is gone forever (seriously, there’s only a tiny fraction of scammed funds ever recovered due to the shadowy, overseas locations of scammers), and you’re breaking into a cold sweat. 

** The US Secret Service remarked that folks “mis-send” to cybercriminals on average $150,000 every 37 seconds in the United States alone! 

Put another way, you feel you’re rightly paranoid about this invoice or really any invoice sent via email. Well, what if you knew in advance if the invoices or payment info you were sending via email was being eavesdropped on by cybercriminals?

With RMail’s cutting-edge Email Eavesdropping™ alerts turned on, you would know when you or your clients are being drawn into the above scheme before you or they are cut out of the loop. 

[Click here to re-live our recent webinar delving into this topic at a technical level with expert CIOs.]

Put another way: if an email someone sends is being eavesdropped on due to an unknown security issue with the recipient’s email account – before THEY mis-send invoice payments TO YOU, you will be alerted. Plus, you and they (if they use RMail), will get alerts after they click SEND, before the message is sent, that they are about to correspond with a cybercriminal unknowingly, thus preventing the cybercrime while raising eSecurity awareness at the user level.

Now that we’ve let you know about a cure for Payment Paranoia, you’ll have to think of other, hopefully more blissful activities that can take the place of those cold sweats and sleepless nights. Maybe you’ll pick up crochet or bread baking? 

Feel free to contact us to learn more about RMail and Email Eavesdropping™ alerts.