Scam emails from @gateway.gov.uk

Scam Emails Are Not From The Government

Scam emails pretending to be from the Government Gateway are being set out again.

Some scam emails are still offering larger bodily parts or performance enhancing substances but they are easy to spot by both humans and computers. So the scammers have taken things up a notch in the past year or so, creating plausible and relevant scam emails that could catch the unwary.

One such email currently being distributed is pretending to be from the Government Gateway, part of the UK’s e-Government service for various business and tax electronic form submissions.

Genuine or Not?

Looking at the example email on the right how can you tell if it’s genuine or not?

Well, the graphics used are genuine, but they are easily saved from the genuine website so that’s not much help.

Looking at the FROM address it looks OK (although the actual genuine email address is ‘gateway.confirmation@gateway.gov.uk‘ not many people would spot this or even know what the genuine address is)

The hyperlink in blue says it is going to the website www.gateway.gov.uk which is a genuine domain, there’s some slightly unusual grammar but again nothing that shouts ‘scam’ so do we click the link?

NO!

First of all ask yourself some relevant questions;

• were you expecting this email?
• have you submitted any documents to the gateway?
• were you expecting to have to download a form?

well there’s a chance you have but still, before you click the link in any email, hover your mouse pointer over the link text. This will usually cause a box to pop-up showing the address the link will take you to.

Why bother when you can read the address in the link text? well because the link text can actually say anything at all. So while it may say it’s going to the Government Gateway site, when we check we see it’s actually going to a completely different site: