E-mails received from the “Latvija.lv” portal seem suspicious to residents; the maintainer of the page confirms their sending / Article

Arno Jundze, chairman of the Writers’ Union of Latvia, was one of the recipients of the e-mail. He said that he received an e-mail from VRAA with an instruction to verify his e-mail on the “Latvija.lv” portal.

“Well, of course, as a law-abiding guy, I press at the first moment and then I start to think what I have done. Nothing happens! Some kind of window opens, says that I have received a code in my e-mail, there is no code. I wait, I smile for 10 minutes, 15 minutes. I press again.. I wait, I smile… Nothing happens.. Then I start thinking what I have done,” he said.

Jundze has fallen into the clutches of victims a couple of years ago, so he has a question – is this not a fraudulent e-mail again, because there is no information about the possible receipt of such an e-mail.

By posting the message on the social network “Facebook”, he found out that his other acquaintances also received the “Latvija.lv” e-mail.

“It’s a good question – why should I do that? I’ve done everything they asked for at the time, I have all my data. So what do they worry about me? We live normally! I understand that they make something new there and lose it that data, but that’s their problem, not mine. It’s my data being thrown around. And that’s a good question, why does someone have to confirm again?” Yundze expressed confusion.

VRAA: We sent the emails

VRAA, the operator of “Latvija.lv” portal, confirmed that the e-mails were sent from them.

“These are e-mails to verify e-mails that are linked to a specific resident who has used the “Latvija.lv” portal and we could inform the person about new news and similar situations,” explained VRAA Deputy Director Edgars Cīrulis.

So – the new system would work in the same way as the previously known Electronic Declaration System of the State Revenue Service. The user would be contacted by e-mail only if a message had arrived on the “Latvija.lv” portal. But why did the e-mails come now and without prior notification of the citizens?

“This has been happening gradually for a long time. For about a year, users could validate their email,

however, a whole series of users had not done it, and this is the next step to be able to complete this verification, thus improving their communication,” explained Cīrulis.

“Cert.lv”: Citizens should have been warned before sending e-mails

Cybersecurity expert Gints Mālkalnietis, representative of the information technology security incident prevention institution “cert.lv”, emphasized that the maintainer of “Latvija.lv” should have taken preventive actions:

“If we are going to send something publicly to many thousands of people, we must, first of all, warn that such a case will happen.

Well, secondly, it’s also a little bad that some of that infrastructure actually went down and the people trying to validate those emails failed.”

System problems have been fixed, confirmed the maintainer of “Latvija.lv”. But the representative of “cert.lv” emphasized that if residents receive an e-mail that seems suspicious, the best option is always to make sure of it by asking the institution itself.