09/11/2024
I received this e-mail today. It looks like a standard-issue DocuSign e-mail, except I haven't signed up for anything recently that should have required anybody to send me anything via DocuSign, so, naturally, I was suspicious. Notice anything that doesn't look quite right? Let's start with the sender, which appears as a depersonalized "HR DEPARTMENT" all in caps, while the Reply-To address is [email protected]? That's different; all DocuSigns I've received in the past have come from people whose names I knew. Besides that, my company is a sole proprietership, with no HR department, and I haven't applied for employment with anyone else, so what HR department would be sending me anything in the first place? How about the body of the e-mail, where I'm addressed simply by my e-mail address and a cryptic "Remittance Advice .pdf" - yes, with a space between Advice and .pdf - and the capitalization of "Thank you" is wrong? And if it's really a remittance advice, then what's it for? A remittance advice would normally be sent to acknowledge payment for something. Why would anyone need to send me a DocuSign for that, much less an HR department? (Payments are generally received and acknowledged by Accounts Receivable departments and sent by Accounts Payable departments, not HR departments.) Well, I wasn't going to click on the big, gold REVIEW DOCUMENT link, as I really didn't care to find out what that might lead to, but I did check out the sender e-mail address domain. How do you like that, thealexanderspartnership.com turned out to be a recently registered domain name with no web site associated with it other than a generic park page from the domain registrar. You guessed it, folks, this was a fake DocuSign, most likely a phishing attempt of some sort. Be careful, folks, the crooks are out there, and now they've learned how to ply their "trade" with DocuSign. Actually, I'm kind of surprised it took this long for me to receive a spoofed DocuSign, because DocuSign has been around for quite awhile now, and always struck me as being ripe for this sort of thing. Hopefully, I've now shown you some pointers to help you spot the fakes yourself.
