Fishing around (fishing?)
What the Monotype representative did next is similar to what a malicious hacker would do when they’re trying to trick someone at your company into clicking a link that will install malware on your computer. Over the next few weeks, the representative sent messages to a dozen or more people from different parts of the business, hoping to trap just one person who would respond to the creepy message they were sending.
Now I had already emailed my design, brand, and digital team colleagues to let them know about this mass-messaging campaign and our action plan for it, but the Monotype rep expanded her campaign to include people on our purchasing team, who I hadn’t thought to warn in advance.
So shortly after, I received a message from a colleague on my procurement team who had been sent a LinkedIn message by her senior manager with instructions on how to deal with this. I explained to my colleague that, as far as I could tell, this Monotype campaign was very similar to the domain name scams that the procurement team is already familiar with. So please sit back until our digital team colleagues have completed their audit and then we’ll figure out who should initiate the conversation with Monotype.
But, like any successful phishing campaign, the Monotype representative’s LinkedIn messages eventually reached someone who responded. It was another person in the procurement team and, to be perfectly frank, I don’t blame them for reacting. They were doing their job to protect our business from potential copyright liability.
being forced to deal with this issue
Since I handed it over to the digital team, I haven’t kept track of how things are progressing. I was brought into the spotlight again when our brand manager included me in an email thread between him and the procurement person who responded to Monotype.
I quickly brought this second procurement person up to speed with our previous action plan and then I rejoined the digital team. Turns out the digital team had completed their audit, found we were in compliance, but had been busy with other work so no one had responded to Monotype. *breath*