The States of Guernsey have issued an apology after mistakenly warning islanders that a genuine message from their income collecting team was a scam… before realising the ‘fraudsters’ were, in fact, themselves.
Islanders who had received a message from income@gov.gg had asked if it was genuine.
Someone within the civil service decided it wasn’t – and promptly told everyone to delete it without opening it.
That same warning was then splashed across the States of Guernsey’s social media pages, with islanders told that any emails from income@gov.gg “are not legitimate and should be treated as a ‘phishing scam’”.
“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 post, which advised concerned islanders to contact their IT team, said.
Their own words rang true, with staff later realising that the address was, in fact, completely genuine.
The email address is used by the Customer Hub, which includes the Revenue Service, and other services involving customers and invoicing.
“This is one of those times where we need to hold our hands up and apologise,” the States said in a subsequent post, admitting they had “come to a rushed judgement”.
While many commenters found the gaffe amusing, others were not so happy – with one person noting that they had already deleted the potentially important revenue service message.