If you receive a suspicious email from me...

...asking for assistance; my true email address is not john.kuvakaswbfva@gmail.com, and I would never ask for gift cards to be sent directly to me. It's a clever scam, but this time, they spelled my name wrong on the signature line. I'm not sure where they derived their list of recipients. But there are folks receiving emails that are nowhere in my contacts.

There are some ingenious scams out there right now. One of them is an email or text to verify your address so a package can be sent to you. Another is an alert that there is a problem with your account or you're late on your payment. This one is actually quite brilliant. It will have a link to their page, maybe something like "bankofamerica.com." But the "r" in America is in Cyrillic, not English. They are very similar. If you click on the link in that email or text, you go to a site that looks authentic, sign in, and now they have your ID and password. 

In short, verify everything, don't give your personal info to anyone, and always type in the URL yourself.