By Toni Burnham
Unfortunately, many of you may have received spam (scam) emails from people pretending to be current or former members of the Maryland State Beekeepers, and you may be pretty confused about this. We want to assure you that we are upset, too.
No officer of MSBA will ever contact you to ask for any kind of gift card, credit card info, cash transfer, or anything else.
In the past, scammers sent these messages only to members of the MSBA Board of Directors, but we have also learned that our mailing list from a few years ago was accessed by an unscrupulous person, and that older information may have been shared.
We want you to know that we have done a couple of things:
- Closed down access to member contact info to a very small group; and
- Made Board member emails harder to find and copy from the website (but you can still contact all of them).
We truly apologize for any inconvenience you have experienced to date!
Fighting spammers
If you check the email address ton each spam you receive, you will see that they come from a completely different person than the name you see: a stranger whose email had been hacked! MSBA does not control those emails, and we cannot prevent them from reaching you: we really wish we could.
If you want to fight back, and can spend a minute doing so, you can check the site that is in the return address at the top of the email. Then you can try to notify the service from which it came. It is a shame to spend this time, I know. Some of the addresses I use to report spam:
- abuse@gmail.com
- report_spam@hotmail.com
- phishing@virginmedia.com (emails from ntlworld.com can go here, too)
- SpamCop Website: https://www.spamcop.net/anonsignup.shtml
- US Government (all kinds of scams, not just emails): https://www.usa.gov/where-report-scams/where-did-scam-take-place#block-usagov-content
We know that many of these con artists seek out volunteer associations because they know we are doing this out of love for our community and a commitment to service...while not being full time professionals. We are sorry to ask you to be vigilant like board members have had to be for awhile. But we have done alright so far!