Scammers are sending emails that appear to be official communications from the city, demanding wire transfer payment and banking information.
“We received an email from one of our contractors who is working with the city to build some homes about a suspicious email that was asking for a wire transfer of funds to move their project forward.”
Deborah Santiago-Sweet is the Community Engagement Manager for the city of Muskegon.
The emails include attachments with fake invoices and reference real projects or programs to appear legitimate.
“We publish all of our meeting packets for our commission meetings online and almost all of the information that was in the scam email this morning came from information from our commission meetings. So anything that goes out is a potential piece of
information for scammer to use.”
Santiago-Sweet stresses the importance of checking to be sure a sender’s email address is correct and calling to confirm any information that seems out of place.
“Something that stuck out to me in the scam email this morning, it said ‘only respond via email’ and you know I always like to call somebody and make sure that it's accurate and I know who I'm talking to.”
She also warns the scammer could be targeting other communities as well.
See this linked PDF (safe to open) for an example of a scam document.
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