It’s come to our attention here at Great Garden Speakers that a number of you have received spammy/phishing emails related to your listing on GGS. It goes something like this:
“Hello, I saw your profile in greatgardenspeakers.org and I decided to use this means to inform you of the project I have at hand, ofwhich (sic) would like you to be a part. Could you please respond back before I go further.”
What You Can Do About Spam
Now, while we cannot stop this from happening — anytime your email address is listed publicly on the internet, this is a possibility — we can give you some advice regarding how to handle it. We know you want to strangle these people/bots (trust us, we do, too), but here’s what we recommend:
- Do NOT respond to an email if it seems vague or sketchy, as in the real-life example above from a GGS member. This includes no personalization, no real introduction of who they are/who they work with, or no mention of specific project details.
- Do NOT respond to emails that seem very poorly written (hello, we’re garden communicators; we can see right through that nonsense) as in the example above. Genuine professionals would never send out an email like that. And if they do, we’d question how great their venue is.
- Do NOT click on any links in the email.
- Under no circumstances give out any personal information about yourself. None, zero, zip. Also nada and zilch.
- Report it as spam, and move to your email trash bin.
What’s the big deal, you might think? Well, if you respond to or click on a link in a suspicious email, this alerts the spammer that your email is an active one, and you open yourself and/or your contacts up to be hacked. Hacking can be mild or severe — but it’s hacking either way and you do not want this.
What We Can Do About Spam – Vote Now!
Now, one thing we can do is to hide your email address in your user profile. The thing is, if we do it for one, we have to do it for everyone. And that means nobody can contact you if you don’t have a link to your email or website’s contact page in your bio or listings. So, we will leave this up to you all. Let your voice be heard by clicking one of the options below, and we’ll let you know what happens!
