It's the nature of scammers to come up with new ways of hoodwinking the public.

When it comes to emails, a foreign name or email address is often enough to set off alarm bells.

But what happens when their email address is that of a respected local company?

That's what Spark customer Ivan Hamilton found when he opened his emails this week – a message from aburlington@spark.co.nz, saying there was a problem with his account.

'It said I had one unread notification about my account, and had a link to follow,” says Ivan.

He was suspicious, despite the authentic-sounding email address. So he got in touch with the company.

'I'd been having a lot of trouble with my email so I phoned the lady from Spark who had been fixing the problem for me. She fiddled around and said ‘nah, that's a scam' and it was the first time they'd seen that one. So she took a copy of everything and send it off to the people at Spark to investigate.

'It would have been pretty easy for people to click on the link and provide information about their account, though.”

Like most of us, Ivan's no stranger to spam from scammers, including ones saying he's won vouchers from supermarkets – although when they come from places like Sweden, it's easy to dismiss them as frauds.

Spark communications advisor Lydia Tebbutt says there has been an increase in scammers pretending to be from well-known companies such as Spark, other telcos and banks to trick or intimidate people into handing over personal information.

'These fraudsters often monitor corporate activity and mimic their methods of communication, so it can be difficult for customers to tell the difference between what's genuine and fake. The most important thing to remember is that Spark will never contact customers out of the blue and ask for any form of personal information – particularly bank details.

She says if customers aren't sure about the legitimacy of something that appears to have come from Spark, they should get in touch through the contact methods listed their website.

'It's great Mr Hamilton wasn't taken in by the scam. We commend him for recognising something wasn't right, and getting in touch with us to check it out. We forwarded screen shots of the email to our security team and immediately removed the email from Mr Hamilton's account.”

In the past week SunLive has revealed a couple of scams going around the area at the moment, including a mail scam promising a share of $21 million, and a man phoning restaurants for refunds when no purchase was ever made.

One woman phoned in saying she'd been called by a man from Windows, who alleged her computer wasn't running properly – a common scam most people have come across in the Bay.

However, they hung up after the woman revealed she didn't own a computer.