Ever get on a retailer’s email list? The solicitations come every day and they are annoying.

The industry has a way of handling such emails or texts. It’s call, “Unsubscribe”. Like all useful tools, scammers find a way to make something good bad. In this case, they got your email or text from somewhere. They send you everyday (or every hour in some cases) spam that you just want to get rid of.

NO! Don't Do It! So, you go to the bottom of your email and click on the Unsubscribe link. It takes you to a website where you enter your email and click submit. And for your trouble, malware is downloaded on your device where they can track your activity, get login information, etc. That sets you up for a future scam (some of which we have been highlighting here in the Board Brief). You don’t know it, but you are in trouble and susceptible to future harm.

It Looks Familiar... If you’ve bought something from that organization before or you signed up for notifications of “deals” in the past from that institution, unsubscribing is probably a legitimate way to stop those bothersome emails from coming if you don’t see value in receiving them anymore.

If you don’t recognize the retailer or institution, the better way to “Unsubscribe” is to mark the email sender as spam, block the email and your email software will send all emails coming from that email address to your spam or junk folder. They shouldn’t get to your inbox.

If you get such notifications, you need to do 3 things:

1. Report it as spam & block it if that is an option.

2. Get in the habit of going to your spam or junk folder and deleting all the items in the folder (sometimes you can select "Empty Folder").

3. Do a scan of your entire device using your virus protection software. If malware is on your device, it should find it & delete it.

Our Advice
STOP, THINK & DELETE! As with all these stories, the number one factor is you DID NOT initiate the contact. They did. We cannot stress enough the point, if you didn’t initiate a contact like this, it has a very high probability of being a scam.