The US Department of Agriculture’s agricultural marketing service warns that local certified operations and certifiers of the National Organic Program (NOP) may have received phishing emails.

The USDA said that the NOP is aware of several operations and certifiers receiving false emails from senders with a non-government email in carats or square brackets next to it. The scammers ask recipients to confirm conformation, click on a button or link, and enter sensitive information in an effort to acquire data. The USDA says that in this particular scam, phishers have threatened to suspend or revoke an operation’s organic license, but the department assures farmers that is not the case.

To protect themselves from the scam, the USDA advises operations and certifiers to look for the following signs of phishing emails: suspicious sender’s address, including those in square brackets or carats that are disguised as trusted emails, urgent language, generic greetings and signature with no contact information, hyperlinks and websites in body text that do not match the URL text shown when hovering over links, spelling errors, poor grammar, or poor sentence structure, inconsistent formatting, and suspicious attachments with requests for you to download and open the attachments.

If concerned about the authenticity of an email, operations should contact their certifiers and certifiers should contact their Accreditation Manager to confirm the email’s validity.