Someone Pretended to Be Us and Emailed Our Clients for Money. Here's What Happened and How to Protect Yourself.

Recently someone tried to scam every one of our clients by pretending to be me. I want to walk you through exactly what happened, what we did about it, and what every small business owner should do so this never costs them a dime.

What happened

A scammer created a Gmail account with the address jason.phoenixazadagency.com@gmail.com. It is honestly absurd that Google allowed that address to be made, but here we are. He then emailed our clients, got some of them into a conversation, and started demanding $550 each for "website hosting and maintenance fees."

When people engaged, he went further and sent bank account information so they could wire the money: a Citibank account with a Nigerian name attached to it, along with a SWIFT number for an international wire. That account had nothing to do with us.

How we found out

I got a phone call from one of our clients, and she asked me why I was treating her like this. I said hold on a second, what are you talking about? She told me she was put off by a demand for money. I told her we were not demanding any money from her.

She said she thought so, because that is obviously not who we are. We are a straightforward, trustworthy company. We do not send emails in the middle of the night telling you to give us more money and wire it to a foreign bank account.

She was kind enough to call me instead of paying, and I am really thankful she did. That one phone call is the reason this story ends well.

The email likely went out to a few hundred people. Only a few of them reached out to ask what it was about. My guess is most people saw it and moved on, and only a handful got far enough into a conversation to see the demand for money. I pray nobody answered it.

What we did right away

My lead developer and I built an email blast system right then and there, so I could send every client a warning in one go. The message was simple: this is my real email address, and if you are getting emails from anyone else claiming to be us, it is not us. Do not reply, do not pay, and call us if you have any questions.

We also filed a report with the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center, known as IC3, at ic3.gov. If you have come across one of these scams, I recommend you do the same. Reports are how these accounts and bank accounts get tracked and shut down.

Why you should bookmark and whitelist your agency's email

Scammers count on you not looking closely at the sender. A name that says "Jason" and an address with our company name stuffed into it looks close enough at a glance, especially on a phone.

So do this today with your marketing agency, your web developer, your bookkeeper and any other vendor who bills you:

The rules that keep your money safe

The moral of the story is simple. Do not give out financial information because someone asked for it in an email. Not once, not ever.

Always verify that it is really your vendor through a trusted form of communication, like a phone number you already have on file. Do not use a phone number or link that came in the suspicious email.

If a vendor suddenly asks you to wire money, change bank details, or pay a new fee you have never heard of, stop and call them. And if something like this happens to you, please reach out to the vendor and let them know. You may be the only one who tells them, just like our client was for us.

Being a target is part of this industry

This is not the first time we have written about scams, and it will not be the last. We covered how AI scams target seniors, the agentic spam battle, and a whole series on how to know if you are being scammed, including how to reclaim your domain name.

Being a target just comes with the territory when you work with small business websites. People call us all the time because they got a letter in the mail asking for money to renew their domain name, and it is not even from the company that registered the domain. Those letters look official, they use scary words like "expiration," and they hope you pay before you check.

Then there are the fake SEO invoices, the "your listing will be removed" calls, the hosting renewal emails from companies you never signed up with, and now impersonators using your own vendor's name. The pattern is always the same: urgency, a payment request, and a way to pay that skips your normal process.

Want to learn more about security?

If you want a crash course on website security, email security, home security or any of those things, check out Forge. Sign up for the curriculum there and you can learn a lot, and put your standard operating procedures together along with all the other things you need for your business.

Contact us the real way

Enjoy the rest of your day, and if you ever have a question about an email, a letter or an invoice that claims to be from us, call us at (602) 641-8210 or email jason@phoenixazadagency.com. Accept no substitutes. We hope to hear from you.