The States of Guernsey has apologised after misleading members of the public by wrongly labelling a genuine email from the island’s invoicing team as a scam.
People who had received an email from income@gov.gg had asked if it was genuine before opening it. Someone within the civil service decided it wasn’t and people were told to delete the messages without opening them.
The same message was shared via the States social media platforms, telling people that any emails received from income@gov.gg are not legitimate and should be treated as a ‘phishing scam’ and deleted.
“Unfortunately these types of phishing emails are becoming increasingly common and it can sometimes be difficult to determine if an email is legitimate or not,” the original message stated.
“As such, if islanders receive an email claiming to be from the States but they are suspicious of it, we are happy to offer advice on it. You can forward the suspicious email to infosec@gov.gg and a member of our team will check it and advise if it is legitimately a States of Guernsey email or not.”
It seems that someone within the States was over cautious though as staff realised a few days later that the income@gov.gg email address is genuine and has been used to send legitimate messages to members of the public.
“This is one of those times where we need to hold our hands up and apologise,” said the States on social media yesterday after the mistake had been realised.
“We tried to quickly ascertain whether the email was a potential phishing attack and provide advice to safeguard the community, but in doing so came to a rushed judgement,” the message acknowledged. “We are sorry for the error, which only came to light following further investigations yesterday.”
The States has now confirmed unequivocally that income@gov.gg is a legitimate email address used by the Customer Hub team.
The advice remains the same though, and if anyone receive any email purporting to be from the States of Guernsey they can check by contacting the service area directly.
If anyone receives an email that they believe may be fraudulent it can be forwarded to infosec@gov.gg to be checked.
When the States posted the apology to Facebook yesterday the majority of comments expressed humour in the gaffe. But some people felt it was more serious.
At least one person who had received an email from income@gov.gg said they had deleted it on the basis of the previous message declaring that it was a scam.