Email scams have gotten a lot more sophisticated and convincing since the days of far-fetched stories about deposed royalty seeking out your help in an extremely poorly worded email from “[email protected].”
The best of them even send real PayPal invoices or copy entire legitimate websites to lure people into calling fake 1-800 help lines answered by convincing people posing as company representatives. It’s wild out there, folks.
Surfshark, a popular Dutch VPN provider, announced today that they’ve introduced an email scam checker that uses—what else?—AI to identify patterns used by scammers, which should theoretically help detect even convincing, well-crafted scam messages.
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how surfshark’s email scam protection works
I haven’t used Surfshark (yet), but in this post from last week explaining how they’ve nearly doubled their number of VPN servers, I describe why Surfshark’s vetting and practices seem solid and transparent.
“Nine out of ten scams originate directly from emails, rather than attachments,” read a quote by Nedas Kazlauskas, product manager at Surfshark, in a Surfshark-distributed product announcement.
That’s quite a turnaround from the days when “don’t open attachments!” was drilled into our heads as the prime way to avoid catching a computer virus or getting scammed right out of your boxer shorts.
The scam checker’s AI “analyzes email content, sender details, and other characteristics to warn users about potential harm,” as Surfshark vaguely puts it.
As for maintaining the level of anonymity and privacy that it promises as a VPN, the email scam checker does mean that it’s reading your messages.
But Surfshark writes that “the service runs exclusively on servers we fully control, so your data is never stored on outside platforms that might use the data for AI training. After each scam checker request, your data is promptly deleted—meaning it is never shared.”
Given the breadth of its willingness to open itself to regular third-party audits to verify its commitment to a no-logs policy, I’m comfortable enough with that declaration.
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The post Surfshark VPN Just Got Email Scam Protection for Gmail appeared first on VICE.
