An scam email made to appear as part of the borough permitting process targeted at least one Haines resident this week.
Haines resident Jacqueline Funkhouser received an email Monday morning that purported to be from the borough planning commission and signed by acting lands director Donna Lambert. The message asked Funkhouser to wire the borough $4,903 in order to complete a permitting issue.
Funkhouser does in fact have a permitting issue in front of the planning commission right now, and all the information in the email was correct, down to the permit number and borough seal watermarked on the page. Only, the email was from a non-borough email address, and no such multi-thousand dollar payment is ever needed to complete a simple permitting adjustment, borough staff said this week.
“(The borough) will never ask for money to be wired,” said interim borough manager Alekka Fullerton. Fullerton said that if residents receive requests for payment they aren’t expecting, they should call the borough office or ask in person before making any online payments.
Luckily, that was Funkhouser’s thought process.
“I thought it was extremely concerning that I was advised to pay via a wire transfer,” Funkhouser said. Because of the concern, Funkhouser printed the email and went to the borough office, where borough staff confirmed the email was fraudulent.
Borough IT specialist Tony Wilson said there isn’t much he can do to stop bad actors from impersonating the borough. Wilson, echoing Fullerton’s message, said Funkhouser’s instinct to pause and ask trusted sources before paying was correct.
“Bad actors use urgency to try to get you to rush (into paying), so that you don’t use your cognitive reasoning.”
Going forward, scams with a similar level of accuracy and detail in mimicking official communications may become increasingly common. Wilson said whoever sent the scam email to Funkhouser likely used artificial intelligence tools to scrape information from the borough’s website.
“With (artificial intelligence) it’s just so much faster now to run these scams,” Wilson said. “A program that might’ve taken six months to make now takes minutes.”