Caught a phishing email because of one weird formatting trick

I almost clicked on a fake invoice yesterday from what looked like our shipping vendor. The email looked perfect except the font was slightly off in the body text. Turns out they copied the real email template but used a different default font. I checked the headers and the reply-to address was a Gmail instead of the company domain. Forwarded it to our IT team and they confirmed it was a targeted phish. Now I check font weirdness on every suspicious email. Anyone else got a small visual clue that saved them from a scam?

2 comments

2 Comments

shah.olivia7d ago

Paying attention to small formatting details like that is a skill that carries over into EVERYTHING these days. Scammers rely on us being TOO busy to actually look at what's in front of us. It's the same reason fake parking tickets and phony charity calls work so well - people just react instead of noticing the tiny red flags.

price.jake7d ago

Going the other way on this one - obsessing over font differences is gonna cause more false positives than real catches. @shah.olivia is right that scammers bank on us being busy, but most targeted phishes these days use cloned templates with the exact same formatting. The real red flag was checking headers and seeing a Gmail reply-to address, which is way more reliable than noticing a font is slightly off. You'll drive yourself crazy trying to spot tiny visual differences, especially when a lot of legitimate vendors use multiple font formats depending on how their email client renders things.

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