Members of the architecture profession should be vigilant of a spam/phishing email that does a very good job of mimicking a request for proposals sent out on behalf of a practice.

Architects have notified the OAA about the fraudulent emails, which have also been sent to Association staff, though those attempts were successfully filtered out.

The email will have a subject line such as “Invitation to Submit Proposal – [an OAA Practice Name]” and include the firm’s logo and appear to link back to actual email addresses. Automated follow-up replies also serve to mislead recipients about the email’s legitimacy. Should you enter your password, the email will then replicate itself to your own contact list.

Always practise an abundance of caution and report or delete such emails. This particular email is neither new nor specific to the design community—this website covered the story when it occurred in Australia—but it has been making the rounds as of late.

As a reminder: while the OAA maintains a publicly accessible practice list on the OAA Website and also has a voluntary Mentor Directory on its private member-only side, it does not provide, sell, or share members’ individual contact information with anyone.