The email address of a government employee has been hacked and scam emails claiming payment receipt of relief funds have been sent out, certified fraud examiner, Paul O’Sullivan, told Tourism Update.
The email address is Doris.Leshabane@gauteng.gov.za and the email reads: “Find payment receipt for the disbursement for the COVID-19 relief funds and do allocate appropriately and do advice (sic) accordingly”, followed by a link to “view payment online”.
The email is signed off by the ‘Head of Finance’ for Gauteng, despite the employee being in a processing position for the Gauteng provincial health department, O’Sullivan said.
After clicking on the hyperlink, the recipient is directed to a file deposit site in New Zealand, with a 29kb MS Word file called ‘payment receipt’. “Do not open. This may be either malware or a Trojan-Horse type of virus,” he warned.
“Any innocent person could easily click on that and get their machine infected or, worse still, download crippling ‘ransomware’.”
