Bad Rabbits Hopping to Emails Near You
- By Stefan Hammond
- January 16, 2023
With the Year of the Rabbit hopping merrily into view, corporate communication professionals anticipate another opportunity to connect with their clientele. But is it always a good practice to relentlessly ping your customers with Lunar New Year greetings, no matter how well intended?
We all carry shiny black mirrors, and shredding massive bandwidth on generic text messages is simplicity itself. Just hit “send” — no effort at all.
CDOs who prize their corporate communication skills urge caution. Consider your target audience — will their phones vibrate with New Year's greetings from friends, families, and your competitors?
100 billion
One source crunched the numbers for Gregorian New Year's Eve 2020 and discovered a record-breaking message load of approximately 100 billion — on WhatsApp alone.
Considering that the messaging platform (owned by multinational technology conglomerate Meta Platforms) had 1.5 billion users at the time, that's ~67 messages per user. While many think of it as a personal comms platform, the service offers a business app used by myriad small businesses — from Indonesian silversmiths to boutique German paint vendors.
Thanks to WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption, we don't know exactly what those New Year's Eve messages said. But it's a fair bet that most of them simply contained generic well wishes for the new year.
Mobile phones firing ringtones and buzzing like rattlesnake tails
Extrapolating from the user's vantage point, we envision mobile phones firing ringtones and buzzing like rattlesnake tails as the witching hour approached. That 100 billion figure represents ~13.3 times the 2020 global population.
During peak messaging periods like holidays, greetings — especially generic ones — are often viewed more as spam than warm well wishes.
And in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, that's a problem.
COVID-19 FUD
The pandemic taught us about social distancing but at the cost of social customs. Instead of meeting face-to-face, we learned how to hoist fancy digital backdrops for our Zoom meetings.
And we fielded new forms of mobile-phone-borne communication like contact tracing. “Contact tracers are usually hired by a state’s department of public health,” said a statement on the U.S. Government's Federal Trade Commission website. “They work with an infected person to get the names and phone numbers for everyone that infected person came in close contact...”
COVID-19 boosted digital communication, including unsavory and unscrupulous text messaging
While a useful strategy for tracing infectious diseases, as few were aware of contact tracing prior to COVID-19, this proved ripe for exploitation by scammers. Remember that dodgy text messages prey upon FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt), and during the early days of the pandemic, a message popping up on mobile phones warning that “someone you've come into contact with has tested positive for COVID” set off the FUD alarms.
“Contact tracing plays a vital role in helping to stop the spread of COVID-19,” said the FTC. “But scammers, pretending to be contact tracers and taking advantage of how the process works, are also sending spam text messages that ask you to click a link.” And as we all know, clicking links in random text messages is a bad practice.
Counting the cost
COVID-19 boosted many forms of digital communication, unfortunately including unsavory and unscrupulous text messaging.
“Both spam calls and spam texts increased in quantity over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, with 5.9 billion spam calls reported in June 2021 alone, an 11% increase,” said an article on Digital Trends. “Now, it seems text message spam is on the rise, with many of us having had a barrage of suspicious-looking text messages recently.”
Beware the smish
Phishing scams were first detected in the mid-90s, but “as of 2020, it is the most common type of cybercrime, with the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center reporting more incidents of phishing than any other type of computer crime,” according to Wikipedia. But that's not bad enough: “SMS phishing or smishing is a type of phishing attack that uses text messages from a cell phone or smartphone to deliver a bait message.”
“Smishing is a term used to describe phishing attempts and scams that use text messages or (Short Message Service) SMS as the primary attack platform,” said Verizon. “Smishing is used to gather different types of personal information, including address, credit card information and more.”
“Scam types vary, but they will all attempt to rope you in with lucrative offers (like free prize money from a reputed retailer); attempt to get you to divulge information or take action (by pretending to be a friend or family member in need); or dangle fake information about a transaction or account (like a package delivery),” said Verizon.
Think twice
Globally, more entities celebrate Gregorian New Year than Lunar New Year. But in Asian communities worldwide, the Year of the Rabbit will be celebrated—and families who haven't reunited since COVID will enjoy one another's company.
It's something worth commemorating but think twice before blasting a canned greeting to your entire user base. Due to holiday traffic, your good wishes may be relegated to the sin bin.
Gung hei fat choi!
Stefan Hammond is a contributing editor to CDOTrends. Best practices, the IoT, payment gateways, robotics, and the ongoing battle against cyberpirates pique his interest. You can reach him at [email protected].
Image credit: iStockphoto/nicescene