Washington Business Registration Renewal Letter Scam

Businesses in Washington should be aware of a possibly fraudulent letter claiming to be an official bill for annual business registration fees.

One letter received by an Edmonds-based business directed the business to send $121.86 to a post office box in Olympia. The letter stated, “your state annual report will not be filed until payment is received.” 

The misleading letter did not include the Office of Secretary of State logo, as an official letter from the Office of Secretary of State would - see the example pictured above.

Washington Secretary of State Kim Wyman is working with the attorney general's office to see what further action should be taken to protect businesses.

“We’re working with the Attorney General’s Office – the agency that investigates and prosecutes consumer fraud – to see if further action should be taken to protect businesses in Washington,” said Wyman, whose office includes the Corporations and Charities Division.   

Wyman added that any business owner who receives a registration-related bill from an unknown third-party company should contact the Attorney General’s consumer protection division or file an online complaint at atg.wa.gov/fileacomplaint.aspx. 

To check the status of your business filings, visit sos.wa.gov/corps

Another related bit of news about scams and hacks: 

Are you one of 26,151,608 people pwned in the Ticketfly data breach? A hacker took control of Ticketfly's website and claims to have stolen the company's customer database.

In May 2018, the website for the ticket distribution service Ticketfly was defaced by an attacker and was subsequently taken offline. The attacker allegedly requested a ransom to share details of the vulnerability with Ticketfly but did not receive a reply and subsequently posted the breached data online to a publicly accessible location. The data included over 26 million unique email addresses along with names, physical addresses and phone numbers.

Ticketfly, which is owned by Eventbrite, took down the site and posted a message saying that the company had been “the target of a cyber incident.”

You can be notified of the latest hack.  Troy Hunt, is a Microsoft Regional Director and Most Valuable Professional awardee for Developer Security, blogger at troyhunt.com, international speaker on web security and the author of many top-rating security courses for web developers on Pluralsight.
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Troy does this with www.haveibeenpwned.com. 

​What is ‘Have I Been Pwned?’ all about?

This site came about after what was, at the time, the largest ever single breach of customer accounts — Adobe. Troy often did post-breach analysis of user credentials and kept finding the same accounts exposed over and over again, often with the same passwords which then put the victims at further risk of their other accounts being compromised.

The FAQs page goes into a lot more detail, but all the data on this site comes from "breaches" where data is exposed to persons that should not have been able to view it.

You may have a service to provide you automatic notifications about potential risks. If not, a service such as www.haveibeenpwned.com can keep you informed.
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