Trust No One
Fox Mulder was right.
Trust no one.
Especially someone you know.
Because the latest email scams aren’t necessarily coming from Nigerian princes or mysterious strangers with terrible grammar.
They’re coming from people you actually do business with.
And sometimes, those people really did send the email. They just didn’t know it.
Let me explain.
For years, we’ve been told how to recognize a scam email.
Look for spelling mistakes. Watch out for suspicious email addresses. Be wary of strange requests, unexpected attachments, and messages from people you’ve never heard of.
That’s still reasonable advice.
Unfortunately, the criminals have been paying attention.
And they’ve gotten better at their jobs.
When the Bad Guy Is Already Inside
Imagine you own a small business.
You’ve been exchanging emails with a contractor for months. You know the person. You recognize the email address. You’ve discussed the project, agreed on the price, and you’re expecting an invoice.
The invoice arrives.
Everything looks right.
The name. The email address. The project details. Even the familiar conversational tone.
There’s just one little problem.
The contractor’s email account has been compromised.
Someone else is reading the correspondence, watching the negotiations, and waiting for the right moment.
When the invoice arrives, the bank account information has changed.
You pay it.
The money disappears.
And the real contractor has no idea what happened.
This isn’t some elaborate Hollywood hacking scenario. It’s a form of fraud called business email compromise, and it doesn’t necessarily require the criminals to break into your computer.
Sometimes all they need is access to somebody else’s email.
But I Recognized the Email Address!
Of course you did.
It was real.
That’s what makes these scams so effective.
Criminals who gain access to an email account can read existing conversations, learn how people communicate, and send messages from the account itself.
They can even create rules that automatically hide certain messages, making it harder for the account owner to notice what’s happening.
And now, thanks to AI, they don’t even have to be particularly good writers.
No more awkward grammar. No more strange phrasing. No more emails that sound as though they were translated from English into Martian and back again.
They can sound just like your accountant.
Or your real estate agent.
Or your business partner.
Or your mother.
Well, maybe not your mother. Mine had a way of communicating that artificial intelligence would have difficulty reproducing.
So What Are You Supposed to Do?
You can’t stop communicating with people.
You can’t personally investigate every email.
And you certainly can’t spend the rest of your life assuming everyone you know has been replaced by a criminal mastermind.
But you can change one habit.
When an email asks you to do something involving money, passwords, or sensitive information, verify the request through a separate channel.
If your contractor suddenly changes banks, call the contractor.
Not the phone number in the suspicious email. Use the number you already have.
If your accountant asks you to upload tax documents to an unfamiliar website, call your accountant.
If your boss emails asking you to buy $500 worth of gift cards, call your boss.
Actually, if your boss routinely asks you to buy $500 worth of gift cards, you may have other problems.
The important thing is to verify the request independently.
And if you’re the one running a business, protect your own email account with multifactor authentication, unique passwords, and a little healthy suspicion.
Because if someone takes over your account, they aren’t just stealing access to your email.
They’re borrowing your reputation.
The Truth Is Out There
The old advice was to be suspicious of strangers.
The new advice is to be suspicious of unusual requests, even when they come from familiar people.
That’s an important distinction.
You don’t have to stop trusting your friends, family, clients, or business associates.
You just have to recognize that an email address isn’t proof of who’s sitting behind the keyboard.
Fox Mulder spent years looking for evidence that people weren’t always who they appeared to be.
Turns out he should have checked their email.
Trust no one.
Or, at the very least, call them first.
Today’s Featured Artist: Bishop Gunn
The Story Behind the Song: “Alabama”
“Mulder, the truth is out there, but so are lies.”
— Dana Scully, The X-Files, Season 1, Episode 17, “E.B.E.”
Sometimes the truth is stranger than anything a screenwriter could invent.
In 2018, Southern blues-rock band Bishop Gunn, from Natchez, Mississippi, headed to the legendary FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to record a song called “Alabama.”
One of its lyrics was particularly ominous:
“I hope I don't die in Alabama.”
On the very day they were scheduled to record it, Rick Hall, the legendary producer who founded FAME Studios and helped define the Muscle Shoals sound, died.
The band wondered whether recording a song with that particular lyric, on that particular day, might be in poor taste.
But Hall's son encouraged them to go ahead. His father, he said, wouldn't have wanted the music to stop.
So they recorded it.
And here's another odd coincidence: Bishop Gunn took its name from a tombstone in a Natchez cemetery.
A band named after a grave, recording a song about dying in Alabama, on the day a legend of Alabama music passed away.
If Fox Mulder had heard this story, he'd probably have opened a file.
Today's featured song is “Alabama” by Bishop Gunn, from their 2018 album Natchez.
Listen on Spotify | Listen on Apple Music
For more on the remarkable circumstances of the recording, read this 2018 interview with Bishop Gunn.
The truth is out there. Sometimes it's in Muscle Shoals.
