Scam emails have targeted at least three people who applied for permits with the Haines Borough Planning Commission.
The threat prompted borough staff to redact previously public information to avoid revealing personal information online that could be used to target someone in an attack.
Haines borough IT contractor Austin Neal said the scam targets people who have applied for a permit before the planning commission.
“The permits are scanned in and added to the planning commission packet for the meeting. This information is posted on the Borough’s webpage as part of the public record,” he wrote in an email. “Scammers (likely AI-powered tools and not actual individuals) have harvested this data and used it to contact at least two individuals who filed permit requests.”
At first glance, emails to those contacted appear to be from the planning commission. They ask the receiver to wire the borough a sum of money to complete a permitting issue.
Neal said the IT department can’t block the messages because they’re not routing through borough systems or email accounts.
“We often report these scam attempts to the [Federal Bureau of Investigation] or [Federal Trade Commission], but attempts at tracing these email addresses are generally fruitless,” he wrote. “They almost always originate outside the U.S. and usually make use of [virtual private networks] to further hide their origins.”
In the case of these scam emails, the sender is impersonating a borough employee, so the display name will often say something like Haines Borough Planning Department, Neal said.
“If you look carefully at the actual sender email address, it’s apparent that they aren’t actually coming from real Borough email addresses,” he wrote. “These particular scam emails were using email addresses ending in [email protected].”
That address, usa.com is part of a free, anonymous email service. Official communications from the Haines Borough will only come from email addresses that end in haines.ak.us.
In response to the scam, Neal and borough clerk Mike Denker said borough staff plan to begin redacting some citizen information — like contact details — from permit applications and records before they are published online.
“We’re actively now doing something to protect residents,” Denker said. “A name is one thing, but [we’re] starting to look at redacting anything like addresses, phone numbers, emails.”
The idea is to remove any information that could be used to target the person with a similar scam, he said.
Denker, who has been a strong proponent of transparency at the borough, said that balance has shifted, given the sophistication of the attacks people are seeing.
“You know we get training in business, the borough gets training, but a lot of citizens might not get that training,” he said. “We all have an obligation to try and protect our residents from these things.”
“I think it’s a work in progress — it’s evolving,” he said. “I can’t say where we’ll end up.”
So far, Denker said he doesn’t know whether anyone has fallen victim to the scam.
But he and Neal said anyone who receives an email asking for payment on behalf of the Haines Borough should call the administration office to determine whether it is legitimate.