About a month ago I got an email from someone that I haven’t chatted with in a long time. Actually when I saw his name, I thought, “Wow — it has been too long!”
The email was odd, though. All it said was “Hello! Please email me as I have an opportunity.” Well, this long-ago friend was a former client, so technically this could have been a new opportunity. But because I had not talked to him in a long time I thought the email seemed fishy. So instead of responding, I decided to email him directly.
I went to Linkedin and emailed him to say hello and tell him that an email I received “from him” looked a little weird and within a minute I got a reply. Ok, I thought, lets see what he is up to — a new opportunity could be on the horizon.
The reply was also weird. It said, “Hi, Rich. How are you? I sent it.” But, maybe he is busy, I thought, and that explains the truncated response. So I replied, “Things are good with me. How can I help you?” The reply was then, “I’m glad to hear that. Can you reply on my email. I am in a meeting.”
Now, I was obviously convinced that was weird, so I went a step further and called him. He answered and I immediately asked, “Did you email me today?” First thing out of his mouth was that he was hacked.
So – imagine this: I get a weird email that seemed too short and odd AND THEN through LinkedIn, his network was also hacked. I could even see the little emoticons would light up within LInkedIn to show that “he” was typing his responses to me in real time — only it was NEVER him!
I guess what really came to me is this: even though I feel like I have a good read on what is real and what isn’t, I learned a lot from this example and shared this story with everyone at the office. People can be hacked through multiple sources and while you think you are safe in chatting on one platform to verify that person sent an email, that isn’t enough anymore. This really blew my mind. Just imagine if I took the LinkedIn reply as legitimate and then emailed back like he asked? What then?
This entire situation encapsulates my biggest fears today for online research. Each and every day there is someone learning how to better scam and impersonate a friend, colleague or a company. Who can you trust? And, if people have more experiences like this, they are going to be less and less likely to participate in research needs — and that greatly concerns me.
Aligning with customers to define better ways to communicate is imperative for research assignments. Sending a pre-survey communication is best served by identifying that a survey is coming, defining what the survey is about, introducing the survey company and then having a true contact name and email address from the company. Going a step further, identifying the upcoming survey internally so that all client relationship associates are also aware will help prevent panic from a legitimate request (if internal team members aren’t aware, things could become a mess). If budgets allow, the best way of all to communicate is through good old-fashioned mail correspondence (but when was the last time you received something in the mail?).
Lastly, it can become even trickier when companies attempt to collect data “inhouse” as well as carry on with their regular job responsibilities. Who has time to do this and watch out for sneaky scammers AND do real work? Be safe out there.
