ALEX BRUMMER: My efforts at email hygiene went horribly wrong

My efforts at email hygiene have gone horribly wrong. In an effort to separate my personal, financial, health, voluntary and charitable activities from my work at the Daily Mail I use a personal email account.

Given that company equipment – mobile phone, computer and iPad – are used to access the private account, it was my assumption that double verification and firewalls would largely protect me from scammers.

How foolish you can be.

Alex Brummer admits: ‘My efforts at email hygiene have gone horribly wrong’

I am also very conscious that using company email to conduct personal business could be seen as a conflict.

The appearance of a Daily Mail email address might, for some commercial providers, be incorrectly construed as wanting special treatment.

At soon after 10am yesterday my mobile started to ring incessantly, my WhatsApp account pinged and the message box on my cell-phone lit up. Friends, charitable contacts and colleagues with my ‘private’ email details received an innocuous message purporting to come from me.

Under the subject line ‘Happy new year’ the following words came up: ‘Hi, hope you are well. Sorry to bother you, do you shop online from Amazon?’

The senior colleague who sits opposite me spotted a rat and verbally asked whether this email was really from me.

The same message had gone to my entire personal email list with many overlaps to my work address.

Most of those contacting me were seeking verification that the initial message was from me. But some of my contacts simply hit the reply key.

What came up was the scam missive: ‘I need you to get an Amazon e-gift card for a friend’s daughter who is down with cancer of the Liver, it’s her birthday today and I promised to get it to her today, but I can’t do this now because all my effort purchasing online proved abortive.

‘Can you get it from Amazon. I’ll reimburse you back as soon as possible. Kindly let me know if you can handle it.’

The use of the cancer narrative may have given it an air of authenticity as last year I had my personal run-in with the disease and recipients may well have believed that, as a sufferer, I would be particularly sympathetic to the ‘friend’s daughter’.

To my horror, in spite of some odd syntax, the capital ‘L’ for liver and the repetition in ‘reimburse you back’, at least two acquaintances swung immediately into action.

One extraordinarily well-meaning friend sent £5,000, (later recovered), another committed to £50 and pledged a further £100 from his partner.

They have been scammed and I feel sick to the stomach about it because of my limited control of events. Working for a sizeable company, where we have IT experts on tap, my immediate port of call was to the tech helpdesk.

It immediately swung into action, sending out as many messages and emails to contacts warning of the hack.

But new fake messages were still going out. With the help of IT, new double verification was set up on my office account and my private account closed for 24 hours so the operators could do the security checks.

It turns out that Amazon e-gifts are a bit like digital currency. They are the great favourite of crooks. Email addresses are bought on the dark web and Amazon e-gifts, essentially, appear to be untraceable.

Cash for old rope, a gift to money launderers and criminals, many of whom, I was told by IT security, can be traced to Lagos.

If Amazon e-gifts are such a soft touch for rogues, there are real questions to be asked as to why a company so big, powerful and influential, with access to the latest tech security and AI, hasn’t shut down this huge loophole.

There is enormous frustration among big financial institutions that the onus for combating online fraud and the cost of compensation falls on them.

The banks have tightened up with requirements for face and fingerprint recognition, and warnings about tricksters.

However, the bandits, potentially, could be frozen out if the paths to our personal data were more strictly patrolled by the big providers of broadband networks and if Big Tech ranked risk to users above freedom of expression and profits.

The unbridled power of Big Tech can be a menace.

This post first appeared on Dailymail.co.uk