Dear IFAC Friends and Colleagues,
I urgently need your help for the International
Federation of Automatic Control. There is a re-
ally urgent payment that we need to pay for the
next IFAC conference and the IFAC Treasurer is
currently traveling…
I hope you are already suspicious! With a mail in
your inbox like that, your warning bells should
start ringing in your head. You might have al-
ready received such an email, or comparable
emails, purportedly sent from my or from an-
other IFAC official’s account. The frequency in
which such mails are sent to a growing circle of
addressees, as well as their feigned accuracy,
are alarmingly increasing the last years and
months. This makes them a clear threat to an
organization like IFAC, which is based on vol-
unteers willing to spend their time and money
for the greater good of the systems and control
community.
While these scam mails become more and
more realistic, everyone becomes more in-
formed. This is also why I am devoting this
presidential column to this annoying and in-
vidious subject. Raising awareness and keep-
ing everyone informed is the only way that I,
or rather we as IFAC, can act defensively
against such criminals. Please note that they
did not, and (hopefully) will not, hack my ac-
count. Therefore, one piece of crystal clear
evidence for such a scam mail is the header
of these mails. At first sight, these mails might
seem to come from my account (mostly: frank.
allgower@ist.uni-stuttgart.de) as the ‘sent’ ad-
dress can be arbitrarily falsified without any
hacking. However, when you look at the ‘reply-
to’ mail address in the header, you quickly find
something like ‘eu.rep009@gmail.com’, ‘presi-
dent.ifac@zoho.com’, ‘ac160@aol.com’ and in
case of one really good scam mail even ‘frank.
allgower@ist-uni-stuttgart.de’ (please note the
dash between ist and uni that is a dot in my true
email). Please also be immediately suspicious,
when someone asks you for a money transfer,
possibly urgently. It is probably a matter of time
that you will receive such a scam mail, if you
have not received one yet. So please be aware!
Be suspicious!
If you are one of those who have already re-
ceived numerous such mails purportedly sent
by me, maybe you can also see this as a com-
pliment! You are one of those valuable volun-
teers really involved within IFAC, promoting
the systems and control community, and only
as a consequence you are the perfect target
for such scams. And in case there is an email
so adequately formulated that you are unsure
about whether this is a scam mail, you can al-
ways ask me whether the inquiry is truly from
myself via frank.allgower@ist.uni-stuttgart.de.
Just, please, don’t send them any money. Or,
if you really want to get rid of some money, ask
me for my real bank account ;)
With best regards from Stuttgart
Frank Allgöwer