Threatening scam messages have been sent in the name of the police, where the recipient is told to respond to harsh accusations within 48 hours. You should not reply to the message.
The man from Espoo who contacted Iltalehti received a very special message in his work e-mail early in the afternoon on Thursday. The sender of the message said he was a senior inspector working in the Central Criminal Police.
According to the letter attached to the e-mail, the man from Espoo was suspected of, among other things, cybercrimes related to child pornography. He was told to respond to the email within 48 hours under threat of severe punishment.
– If you don’t answer, we have to get an arrest warrant and press charges against you, the message threatened and also said that the punishment is 4-6 years in prison and a fine of almost 80,000 euros.
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Such was the scam message received by a man from Espoo via e-mail.
“The heart jumped”
The email received by the man from Espoo was not actually sent by the police, but was an attempted scam.
– Yes, the heart jumped when the sender of the message seemed to be the police at first, the man tells Iltalehte, but states that he finally smelled the scam in a few seconds.
His colleague had also received a similar email. They reported the messages to their company’s IT department and warned their colleagues about the scam in motion.
“I don’t know how the scam would have progressed”
The e-mail received by the man from Espoo is an unusual attempt at fraud in the sense that the message did not contain, for example, a link to a foreign website.
Scammers often try to fish or even capture personal information by falsifying various sites or forms, but in this particular contact they were only told to respond to the message – or “accusations” – within two days.
– I don’t know how the scam would have progressed. He suspects that bank credentials or something would probably have been fished.
Here’s how you can spot a scam
The fastest way to detect a scam is by looking at the e-mail address of the sender of the message. The police use their own official email addresses for their contacts, while the message received by the man from Espoo was sent from an address ending in Gmail [email protected].
It can be found in Finland Janne Pentti -, but it is not the chief inspector of the Central Criminal Police, but the police inspector of the National Police Board.
In addition, the clumsy threats and numerous linguistic idiosyncrasies in the message ring alarm bells. The message is full of bad Finnish, compound word mistakes and special expressions that an official body would not really use.
Even though many people quickly recognize such a message as a scam, the man from Espoo nevertheless wants to warn about scams in which people are tried to be trapped by intimidation.
He is worried about how even more obvious attempts can sometimes fall flat on an unsuspecting victim.
– People get lost easily when they don’t want to tell others about things like this, he states.