How Often Do You Check Your Junk Email Folder? by Michael A. Gow

I probably dip into mine about once a fortnight, just to make sure I rescue any genuine emails that may have lost their way.

If your junk folder is anything like mine, it’s a minefield of nonsense from fraudsters pretending to be various ‘banks’, ‘paypal’, ‘fedex’ or even ‘HMRC’. These names are easily mimicked in a fake email address in an attempt to trick you into giving your passwords, bank details, sending money etc. These scams work on the ‘fear’ factor. Fear of being ‘in trouble’, or fear of missing a rebate that is due or a delivery etc.

Some scam emails are actually from people who are in your contacts list. The fraudsters hack into and use their details to contact you, with a story about a lost passport etc to appeal to you to send money to help them in their hour of need or with a link they recommend you click on. Fake Facebook profiles where the fraudster copies the profile picture of a genuine account and creates a new account with the same name and photo, requesting you to become a friend also creep up from time to time. And people fall for them because they trust the person they know and believe it looks genuine. These scams work on the ‘trust’ factor.

You will probably not get further than half a dozen emails into your ‘junk’ folder until you hit an email from someone overseas with some version of their asking for your help to transfer millions to the UK, offering you the opportunity to have a share for your help. These scams work on the ‘greed’ factor. While many of these are obvious—some are getting harder to spot.

I recently received the following email…

‘Hello,Am Mr C* ,i will like to do teeth whitening for group of people for my event that will commence in the upcoming weeks. Do you accept credit card?’

*Actual name omitted

My ‘spidey sense’ was tingling. It seemed plausible but somehow not quite right.

Suspecting it to be a scam, I replied asking for details of where they were holding the event and highlighted that each case would need to be individually assessed. I asked where the delegates came from, and if they had themselves indicated a desire to have the whitening procedure.

A reply arrived with a list of names and ages, asking for my work address so that the driver would know where to bring them, and a request again if I took credit card payment.

I replied once more, asking for further details of where the course was to take place, and did not divulge any more information myself. There was no further reply from them and soon afterwards, I received the following email to a different email address that I have:

“Hello,Am Mrs V*, i will like to do teeth whitening for group of people for my event that will commence in the upcoming weeks. Do you accept credit card?”

*Actual name omitted

They were suspiciously identical in every way other than the name. Perhaps some of you had a similar email?

I have also had two separate experiences in the past of contact with people who have purported to be professionals, who in fact were not. If you’ve ever watched an episode of ‘Catfish’ you will know just how easily it can happen.

We readily accept friends request on Facebook because some of our friends are friends with the person. We trust that the person is a dentist because they say they are. Group admins grant people access to ‘dentist only’ forums, purely by assessing their profile page to judge whether or not they work in dentistry.

I think that we, as a profession must be careful when it comes to sharing personal and professional details in social media groups.

How sure are we that the person we are accepting as a friend on Facebook is actually a dentist, or actually the person they say they are? How sure are we that the people in the ‘closed’ or ‘secret’ forum we are members of are in fact all dental professionals as the group claims?

Social media is an easy and fast way to communicate. Having groups allows us to have conversations and interact with our peers and I am involved in several myself. In my opinion, you should only ever post anything that you would be happy with absolutely anyone and everyone seeing, regardless of how ‘closed’ you think the group is where it is posted.

One way of having more security is to use a dedicated forum which has an administrator and at least some way of verifying users. There are a number of good dental forums out there, however one which has been underused by UK dentists up until now is the Dentaltown forum.

To check out what Dentaltown has to offer and to sign up for free, visit www.dentaltown.com. NB This is separate to subscribing to this emagazine which you can do at www.dentaltownuk.com.

The Dentaltown forum was one of the first dental forums and has a massive number of dentists posting from around the world. There are over 220,000 dentists registered, with over 4.5 Million posts to date! There is even a dentaltown app to make access even easier. We have just launched specific UK boards on the site for clinical discussion. There will also discussion areas relating to articles in the each emagazine, allowing you to give an opinion on the topic, discuss the article with others, or even ask the author a question. We are excited about our new UK classified section. Within this section there is a free to use jobs and vacancy board. It is totally free to use this resource.

DentaltownUK also has a huge amount of educational resources, podcasts and videos. Within this and future issues of the emagazine we will direct you to some of these resources. For example, Howard Farran has interviewed hundreds of people who work in dentistry and we will guide you towards some of these from time to time via this icon:

To show how this works—the icon to the left clicks out to Howard’s interview with myself about dental anxiety management and hypnosis from last year.

We have had a fantastic response to our first issue and DentaltownUK will go from strength to strength. Remember to look out for flashing yellow when you turn pages which indicates that there is a link out to follow to see videos on youtube, visit a website to learn more about that article, or link out to an advertiser’s website. You can also click directly on any web address to go directly to it.

This April issue is packed with outstanding articles and features from around the world and here in the UK.

I was going to write some of my highlights of the issue in my editorial, but to be honest—I would struggle to highlight only some—it is all outstanding and I thank all of the contributors for their efforts!

Enjoy!

Best wishes and Happy Easter
Mike
mike.gow@dentaltownuk.com