Mansfield Police: What To Look For In Scam Emails

MANSFIELD, MA — Mansfield police said residents have been inundated in recent weeks with attempts from those pretending to be from established companies, such as Comcast and Amazon, seeking to defraud residents.

Mansfield police issued a warning last week about one scam in which full or partial customer past or present passwords were referenced in emails from Comcast/Xfinity — in an attempt to get some residents to believe they were legitimately from the sending company — and advised deleting those emails immediately, and possibly changing passwords.

Police said this Amazon email — provided by a town resident — is another example of a scam email. While it looks to be official in many ways, hints to fraudulent emails can often be found with grammatical, sentence structure and spelling errors in the body of the email.

Checking on the sender's address can also indicate that an email might be fraudulent. If you click on the info about the sender's email, instead of an official (XXX@amazon.com) address, it may include a long series of numbers and random letters.

Police said companies, such as Amazon, will never ask you to follow a link back to their site, and instead will ask you to log on to the site using your credentials independently of the email.

In the email below, notice the "we" is not capitalized at the start of the third bullet point:

Mansfield police said residents have been smart enough to delete suspicious emails recently. Both town and county law enforcement have said there has been a dramatic rise in phising email scams recently while many people are home during the coronavirus health emergency.

Related Patch Coverage: Mansfield Police Warn Of Cable Scam