As this tumultuous and emotional election cycle comes to a close, scammers have capitalized on a heightened sense of urgency, an urgency that has been acute for months. How many times have you been urged to register to vote? RIGHT NOW. By legitimate sources? Well, scammers want you to register too, RIGHT NOW, by clicking this button.
A Harvard University student received an unsolicited email this year prompting her to click here to register to vote. The email came from what claimed to be a legitimate political action committee (PAC) and urged Joe Biden supporters to make sure they’re registered to vote and provided a link to do so. This does not seem out of place in an emotional and urgent election on all sides. Sense of urgency and a call to action. However, on a closer look, the student found a spoofed email address and that the alleged PAC did not exist.
The scary part about this scam is it does not seem any pushier or emotionally changed than everything else we have all been inundated with in the past months. The red flags are subtle. Spoofed campaign websites and email addresses can look almost identical to legitimate ones. Following links could lead to a malware upload and in registering to vote on a fake website, victims relinquish personal identifying information.
This scam is likely to reoccur in election cycles to come. Here is what you can do to protect yourself:
- Don’t follow links in unsolicited emails.
- Look out for spelling and grammatical errors in the email and on websites.
- Always check the email address to see if it is spoofed, even minutely.
- Look out for spoofed URLS. For example, it may be asking you to register to vote on a URL that ends in .com instead of .gov. That means it’s a scam.