Fake agencies and recruiters operate almost on the same fraud: They approach people looking for a position on board a cruise ship, river cruise or yachts, present themselves as an official recruiter for the company or a captain of a yacht, and offer a position on board depending on what you’re looking for. After the candidate falls for the trap, the scam consists on getting the personal data of the applicant to be used on different scams and also to ask for a money sum in order to “process documents”, acquire a “green card” or “get the position”. These are three terms that we hear often and are go against everything the IMO sets as guidelines for agencies and recruiters.

From there, you will be able to add new filters using email fields like “From”, “To”, “Subject”, “Has Words”, “Doesn’t have words”, “Has attachments” and/or “message size”. The easiest filters you can create use just the “From” field. A combination of “From” and “Have Words” also work as great.

In our example, we are going to create a filter to select all messages from the Brightwell bank used by Norwegian Cruise Line, Carnival Cruises, Princess Cruises and many others. As of april 2021, all their official messages come from emails ended with @brightwell.com or @brightwell.zendesk.com. With this in mind, you can create a filter “From”, fill with one of those addresses and click to “Create Filter”, to show what action will be taken. There’s many different options, with the easiest one and the one we will be using on this example is to “Apply the Label”. You can create a label name, for instance “Brightwell”, and then just have to confirm the action by clicking again on “Create Filter”. Repeat the process for the other email address, choose the label that you’ve created and then now all messages with those two rules will be tagged as “Brightwell” and automatically moved to that Label/Folder on your email account, which will also be reflected when you access the Gmail app on your phone.

Received an email from “Brightwell” but it wasn’t redirected to that specific folder/label? Well, then it probably isn’t an official message from the company and it’s mostly a spam or scam attempt. Read the message anyway and if its requesting for you to click into any links or provide any private information, you know what to do. From there, you can also choose to block the message and congratulations, you’re now filtering all really important messages on your email account.

Filtered an email from “Brightwell” but it requires you to confirm personal data or asks you to click on a link? Sometimes scammers are able to bypass the “From” field to make it look like the email received came from an official source. We call this a false-positive, and you can adapt to it by using a combination of other filters, but the frequency of this happening is very, very low.

You can repeat this process as many times you want, using any email address, field or rule to create filters for all your messages, as long as you use their official accounts and do not click on any links, you will always be safe. This little tutorial was made for using a gmail account, but you can also find the same settings on other different email providers like Yahoo, iCloud and Hotmail. Use what you’ve learned here and share your recently acquire knowledge with colleagues, friends and family as well.