19/08/2026
A short awareness post for our clients and our network.
Someone is sending emails pretending to be 21 Webs.
An individual has created the address [email protected] and is using it to contact businesses, presenting himself as our company.
First, the most important part.
There has been no data breach. Our systems have not been compromised, no client account has been accessed, and no client information has been taken from us. The businesses being contacted are ones listed publicly in the portfolio section of our website. He is simply reading names off a public web page. Nothing more sophisticated than that has happened, and there is nothing on our side that has been exposed.
We have notified the Australian Cyber Security Centre and have filed an impersonation report with Google.
How to tell the difference:
Every genuine email from us comes from our .com.au domain. We will never contact you from a Gmail address or any other free email service.
We will never ask you to change our bank details by email. If any message asks you to pay into a new or different account, stop and call us on 1300 310 120 first.
What to do if you receive one:
Do not reply to it and do not click anything inside it.
Delete the email.
Block the sender.
Report it to your email provider as phishing or impersonation. In Gmail and Outlook this takes one click, and it is what gets these accounts shut down.
If you have already responded or made a payment, contact your bank straight away and let us know so we can add it to the report.
Why I am posting this publicly rather than quietly emailing around it. Impersonation of this kind is trivially easy to set up and it is happening to small businesses across Australia every day. If your business has a public client list, testimonials page or portfolio, that is a ready made target list for someone willing to spend an afternoon on it. Worth telling your own clients today which domain you will always write from.
And if anything from us ever looks slightly off, ring us. We would far rather take the call.
Paviter Singh (Pav)
Managing Director, 21 Web Solutions Pty Ltd T/A 21 Webs
