How To Determine If An Email or Text Is Fraud or Spam

We frequently get asked questions about a situation that appear to come from fraud and spam senders. Here is an example of an email below that is fraudulent and impersonating the Meta team.

Always look at the domain of the email address to determine if the email is real or fake. In this image below, the email is coming from do_not_reply@on24event.com. The domain is on24event.com. If this was an email from Meta the domain would be meta.com or facebook.com.

Now, some fraudsters will be more clever and create a domain that looks more like business.metabusinessnow.com or it might read meta.on24event.com. It's important to know that the "business." and the "meta." are considered subdomains. Those aren't root domains. 

With a subdomain, anyone can create a name that goes before their domain and looks like that. No one can, however, impersonate a domain like meta.com or facebook.com. That is considered the root domain.