Category Scams

I woke up this morning to an invoice over $500.00 in my email inbox to my personal PayPal account, sent via PayPal. It looked real. It felt real. All the links were pointing to the correct URLs. The email didn’t seem to have been spoofed. Even the funky letter/number combination in the footer of the email looked real.

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Scams apparently come in cycles. These days, a scam that was very prevalent in 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic is resurfacing with a vengeance. The scammers send out “employment/job offers” that read roughly as follows:

Dear Interpreter/Translator,

Your listing (contact information) that was published on [insert directory or association listing here] has been reviewed by our HR Department at [insert name of random huge corporation here] and we are pleased to invite you to an online interview/briefing exercise.

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This new-ish scam seems to target anyone with a business website, that is, organizations, corporations, businesses, freelancers, etc. The scammers send a warning note through the website contact form or via the stated contact email address. The note contains a warning that the website owner allegedly violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by using copyrighted images. As webmaster of the Northern California Translators Association, I have received several such messages in recent weeks. The scam message contains a link that then downloads a virus and/or ransomware onto your computer.

The full content of the message reads:

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Consider the following scenario: You receive an email message from the HR department of a large international corporation inviting you to a job interview. The company is looking for a language professional with precisely your skill set. The offer sounds perfect, almost too good to be true. So, you look for the company online, the company URL (its address on the World Wide Web) matches the email address, and everything seems fine. Or is it? Read my new article on Translorial.com to find out how you can tell whether an email is authentic or could be a scam.

I recently got interviewed for the podcast of ATA’s Spanish Language Division. I chatted with Gloria Cabrejos about the circuitous career path that led me to become a patent translator and about scams that target language professionals.

Listen to the SPD podcast interview here.

The recording for my webinar on cybersecurity essentials for language pros is now available on demand. To view the webinar and receive the handouts, visit the NCTA page here.

Specific topics covered include:

• Passwords, passphrases, and hacking
• Internet security: routers, Wifi, and VPNs
• Securing other (mobile) devices
• HIPAA, remote interpreting etc.
• Phishing, smishing, spoofing and scams