Are your employees receiving scam email about helping transfer millions of dollars from Nigeria and other countries?

These scams have been circulating the Internet for years.  They use snail-mail and Fax as well.  Most people know about them, but wouldn't it be great to get yourself off their email distribution list?

First, for those interested in more background there are some great Internet resources describing the scams in detail.

Three good links are
US Secret Service
US State Department Advanced Fee Fraud report
US Embassy in Nigeria (newsletter)

The US Secret Service and State Department refer to these as Advanced Fee Fraud scams.  They are also widely known as "419 Scams," a reference to the section of Nigerian law that deals with these issues (see the links above).

Many organizations choose to have their employees just ignore these email's.  Others try, with varying degrees of success, to delete the email's by using Spam filters on their email systems.

Our approach is different:  Find out why your employees are on the scammers list, and do something about that.

With some good analysis, and some remediation work on your part, it is possible to reduce or even eliminate these Nigerian/419 scam email's from being sent in the first place.  It takes an analysis of your own infrastructure, and a knowledge of how the scammers work.  Once the assessment is done, you will receive a prioritized list of recommended actions.  There are no guarantees, but these methods do have a history of success reducing the inbound scam email.
 

Tom Overman is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), Information Systems Security Management Professional (ISSMP) and is certified as an Adjunct Faculty Member of the National Security Agency's National Cryptologic School.  In addition, he has over 20 years experience in telecommunications, data networks,  business process management, and program management.

Please contact Tom via email or 408.314.3582