By MATT PIKE
St. Joseph residents, busineses, and community partners are being warned to be vigilant with a rise scam emails from people posing as official goverment representatives.
These emails originate from outside the City organization but are designed to appear legitimate by using official-looking logos, letterhead and other formatting intended to mimic government correspondence. In some cases, the emails include fake invoices or payment requests. Phishing scams have become increasingly sophisticated, and government agencies nationwide are experiencing an uptick in fraudulent emails impersonating official organizations.
These scams can make it difficult to distinguish fraudulent messages from legitimate communications. The City of St. Joseph is encouraging anyone receiving emails requesting payment or financial information to carefully verify their authenticity before responding or taking any action. To help identify fraudulent emails, the City reminds the public of the following.
- Official City of St. Joseph emails only come from a .gov email address. Emails from the City of St. Joseph will end in .gov. Official City emails will not come from addresses ending in .com, .org, .us or other domains.
- The City does not send invoices requesting wire transfers without established payment instructions.
- The City of St. Joseph, including the St. Joseph Police Department, will never request payment using gift cards or cryptocurrency, including Bitcoin.
- Businesses with items involving City Council action should exercise extra caution. Business names and addresses associated with City Council agenda items are public information and are often included in official notices and media reports. Scammers may use this publicly available information to create convincing fraudulent emails.
Anyone who receives an email claiming to be from the City and questions its legitimacy should not use the contact information provided within the email. Anyone who receives these emails should visit the City's official website to locate the appropriate department's contact information to call and verify if the communication is authentic. The City also encourages recipients to avoid clicking links, downloading attachments or responding to suspicious emails.
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