M&A Emails and Scams

Insights by Peter Watson.

Have you noticed an increasing number of seemingly very well targeted emails appearing in your inbox, often with an apparent knowledge of your business? They are almost all selling something and in the context of M&A they are likely a wannabe acquirer. Has each potential acquirer individually researched your business? Probably not – AI generated search is here and expanding rapidly – so you can expect much more of this to come. For a hard-pressed owner-manager the increasing attention is probably not actually that welcome!

Another rising phenomenon is the presence of phishing emails directed from apparently willing investors or buyers of your company. Why would they purport to be interested? You’re unlikely to be duped into actually paying them cash (though some do try to charge assessment fees so this should be a clear signal to disengage), but you might unknowingly give them information which they can leverage for identity theft, spear phishing or worse.

Sadly, AI is not just available to business development teams, but criminals too. We can expect increasingly convincing emails from malign operators. The ability to verify who is genuine and who is fake is going to become ever more important and the value of verified information sources is going to go up.

Prism now invests significantly into legitimate paid information sources. Using them to sort the wheat from the chaff is an essential activity – especially when researching potential target buyers. It can be time consuming checking out the veracity of direct approaches. We would strongly suggest that if you are minded to entertain a buyer, that you run a process rather than just go along with something that lands in your inbox. Don’t misunderstand me: direct approaches can be very genuine – it’s just that increasingly many are either well-sculpted but scatter-gun or they are downright fraudulent! Let the likes of Prism do the verification for you – and of course source additional, properly qualified targets from our own knowledge base and other trusted sources. We will not only find real buyers, but we will find the right buyer and get you the best price for your business.

Getting involved with a ‘buyer’ who turns out to be a scammer could end disastrously for you, but there are also plenty of other issues that can arise during the sale process and potentially scupper your deal. To find out 10 ways that you can try to avoid these pitfalls and be more likely to successfully sell your tech, software or IT business please join our free live webinar on 22 October.