Cybersecurity Business April 2026 · 5 min read

The Fake Valet: Why Email Filtering Matters

Written by: Tyson Wilcox

I was perusing various stories on the Internet recently and came across an interesting article about a man who managed to steal a car from a woman. The interesting bit about this story? She willingly handed over the keys to her car. How did such a crime happen? Let’s get into it.

This took place in 2025 in Providence, Rhode Island at Hasbro Children’s Hospital. The woman was a mother with a sick child. She rushed to the hospital to get medical care for her child and, upon arriving, was pleased to see they had a valet service available, letting her focus on her child’s health while someone else parked her car. She handed over her keys and went inside. The problem was, the hospital didn’t have a valet service. Instead, the man was a thief looking for an easy mark. The result?

The car was stolen and ultimately destroyed in the resulting police chase and crash.

So how does something like this happen? Let’s take a look at what we know. First, the woman in question was in a hurry. She had an emergency that she needed to act on and the presence of a valet made for an enticing convenience to help facilitate her needs. It is reasonable to assume that a person in a uniform handing out tickets at the entrance to a facility is there to park your car. This is especially true when you consider that the criminal was wearing a very authentic looking uniform. Nothing at the front of the hospital pointed to the fact that there was no valet service at the hospital.

The bottom line? The woman did nothing wrong here. She trusted a system that should have verified the legitimacy of a valet before she was asked for trust. How long had the man been outside that hospital? How many people had walked past him? How many employees saw him?

The Threat Your Email Faces

This is actually quite analogous to how criminals target your organization in an effort to gain access. They:

Pose as a legitimate contact
Create a sense of urgency
Disguise their activities in authentic looking emails and websites
Make you believe you received what they were claiming to offer

Globally, an estimated 3.4 billion phishing emails are sent every day. Most of them fail to produce a victim, but attackers only need a fraction of them to succeed. At that scale, filtering is no longer an optional feature of your infrastructure, it’s critical to basic risk containment.

The problem organizations face is one of volume. It’s an imbalanced equation created by criminals. The attackers only need one attack to succeed to achieve their goals. As the defender, it is critical you stop as much as you can and trust your people and workflows to catch the rest. In the game of numbers, the attackers clearly have the advantage. To fight back, we need to reduce the number of threats that can actually make it through to the end user, and we do that with a Secure Email Gateway.

The Filter at the Gates

Dirty water can be made safe to drink by passing the water through specialized filters that remove pathogens, contaminants, and other hazards. With the right equipment, it can be safe to consume water straight out of a dirty pond. A secure email gateway is similar in function, but for your email. As emails come in to your mail server, the gateway scans them for evidence of malicious content, phishing links, or just spam. Depending on the configuration of your gateway, malicious emails can be placed into a quarantine list for later review, or outright deleted. This filter serves to greatly reduce the number of threats making their way to your inbox, making it easier for you to keep yourself protected online.

Why This Matters

Criminals are getting more persistent in their attempts to gain access to your data, the cost of a successful attack is increasing every year. In 2024, it was estimated that the average cost of a successful business email compromise was $35,000—an increase of 23% from the previous year. These incidents are primarily composed of compromised email accounts used to initiate fraudulent funds transfers.

Even if your email account isn’t used to authorize the transfer of funds, a compromised account can still cost your organization in more subtle ways—loss of customer trust, stolen company information, loss of access to important accounts, and more. What’s more, containment, investigation, regulatory fines, and remediation costs increase the cost of a breach even further. In fact, the average breach lifecycle in 2024 was between $4.6 and $4.8 million.

Given the costs and risks involved in a breach, this is no longer a matter of if your organization comes under attack, but when. It is quite likely your employees have already seen malicious emails hit their mailbox. It isn’t the responsibility of your users to question what they expect to be a verified system they are asked to trust. Your users’ judgment shouldn’t be the first line of defense against an attack.

Remember, the criminals send out these attacks in the literal billions at little to no cost to them. They don’t care if 99% of their attacks fail, because all they need is 1 to succeed. It is critical that you give your users the tools to keep them from being forced into an impossible level of vigilance. Don’t require your users to determine if the valet is real.

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