If you happen to get an email from any board member in regards to gift cards, do the following: delete and disregard the email.
Someone has been e mailing out requests to purchase gift cards for employees. As seen below: (Thank you Preston for bringing this up to give notice to everyone prior to an onslaught of emails and phone calls.)
I only use Tim (above) as an example because this happened today. Please do not bother the board of directors with questions about this.
The first thing you should always look at is what email address the email you have in question came from. It may be from a completely different account that is unrecognizable than any have ever received an email from them in the past.
If it appears to be from them, that comes to the second question to ask yourself: I haven’t had an email from him before, why would he be emailing me, asking me to purchase stuff. Something like this, you can bet it would be coming from your manager, division manager or Barry.
You must realize that we block thousands of emails like this on a daily basis, as well as block attacks from Russia, Germany and China from accessing our networks, daily. This particular email came through, in part because of his name being in the email, and our system recognizing him as having an address as well in our system, and having emails from our system going out to a person of that name.
There is a balance between locking everything down, having a physical person reviewing email subjects and senders and pushing them out with a delay, and then being completely open where everything comes through. We are in the middle using software that is triggered by certain elements of an email and then sending them to the intended user, quarantining them, completely blocking them, or marking them as junk to go to the end user mailbox to sit in Junk just in case it is a valid email.
I hope this helps a little in explaining why you may have gotten the email or similar emails, and the answer in what to do with said emails when received.
If you receive something that is obviously fake (what we call – phishing/impersonations/spoofing) , please delete the email. That’s it.