This morning I received an inquiry on my website from a woman calling herself Florence Taylor. She said she’d found out about me from one of my clients (she mentioned them by name) and told me she needed some help with her website: edits to the homepage, fixes to the mobile version, and to make the site faster overall. All totally normal.
It’s also worth mentioning that her business, an exterior cleaning business called “Mr. Sparkle” has a full-fledged website and even a Google Maps page with over 150 reviews! So it definitely felt legit.
I wrote her back and included my call calendar link for her to sign up for a Zoom call. She replied quickly giving me her call link instead. This in itself is not too unusual – sometimes clients prefer for me to use their call calendar link.
What happened next is when things got weird.
When I tried to schedule a call, I was prompted to log into my Google account. At first I thought this might be just to sync the call time with my own calendar, so I entered my email and password. Then another screen came up and I thought “This is weird.” I closed the window and wrote to her, asking if there was a way to schedule call with her without logging into a Google account.
I never heard back.
And then, a few minutes later, I got an email from Google:
“Google blocked someone with the password for [my email address] from signing into the account.”
At this point, I knew it was a scammer I was dealing with.
So what happened here? I don’t know for sure. Maybe this business isn’t real at all and all the Google reviews are fake. Or maybe this person hacked into a person’s legitimate business and is writing from their email address.
Either way, follow this general rule when protecting yourself from spammers: never enter any of your information or log into any of your accounts as a result of someone contacting you.
Good luck out there!
