We have been made aware of technical-sounding emails purporting to come from Bookswarm (and I experienced receiving one of these myself directly today!).
The subject line reads Action Required: Squarespace Compliance & Renewal Notice and the body of the message says:
I wanted to share an important update I just received from WordPress Support following their internal review yesterday. They’ve confirmed that your website is not fully aligned with the latest WordPress platform requirements, and both your domain and connected extensions/plugins need to be renewed before January 28th.
If these items aren’t renewed in time, your website may be flagged for non-compliance. In more serious cases, this could lead to temporary—or even permanent—downtime. To avoid any disruption to your online presence and ensure everything remains secure and fully functional, it’s important that we take action as soon as possible.
Since I manage your website, I wanted to notify you right away so we can handle this promptly. Please get back to me at your earliest convenience so we can get everything renewed and updated without delay.
Kind regards,
Simon Appleby
Founder & Creative Director
Bookswarm
WordPress Certified Partner
Needless to say, this is total garbage! Clues include:
- I would never send work emails from a personal Gmail account, in this case simon.bookswarm@gmail.com
- I have never called myself Creative Director of Bookswarm
- The subject line talks about SquareSpace and the body of the message WordPress – two totally different systems, one of which we don’t work with
- WordPress Certified Partner is a completely made-up thing
- There is no such thing as a WordPress Support internal compliance review
The email has all the hallmarks of phishing – a plausible sounding premise (superficially at least), an email that looks real if you’re in a hurry, and some deadline-driven jeopardy.
If you receive one of these emails, please mark it as Spam and DO NOT REPLY. I will be doing what I can to get the offending email address shut down for impersonation, but I’m not holding my breath.
Modern life is, as Blur once said, rubbish…