There have always been scams involving the sale of puppies and kittens but currently there are more, due to the social distancing rules that mean prospective buyers cannot visit to view the kittens or puppies and scammers are taking advantage of this.
The scammers offer animals for sale and you pay a deposit, but the animals are never delivered.
It’s always better to either wait until it is possible to view the animals or for someone on your behalf to view the animals but in current circumstances that is not always possible.
If you do choose to buy an animal seen only by photograph or recorded video, then take whatever steps you can to ensure the seller is genuine and that your payment is protected.
Insist on a Live view of the animal e.g. using Facebook Live or Zoom or similar video conferencing services
Verify the track record of the seller
Select a seller close to your location
Verify that payment details for the seller match the company name and address
Do not make full payment until the animal has been received and is what you expect
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“Place this herb under your tongue to destroy skin and nail fungus” is a very stupid email title and gives it away immediately as being a scam message.
The message starts with
“Doctors can’t explain why this insane method passes every lab test… “ which is a phrase commonly used by scammers trying to sell something ridiculous.
It never explains about the magic herb but moves on to claim that putting a spice in your shoes will destroy nail fungus and completely regrow your nails in no time.
Toe nails grow about one third of the rate of finger nails so to regrow a toe nail takes about 18 months.
Not quite immediately.
Complete rubbish of course. Never click on links in these emails as you don’t know what malware is hiding behind the link.
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There are endless PayPal phishing emails – scammers trying to get your login and password. This latest one tries to look like it’s from PayPal but the sender’s email address is a long series of Russian characters. The message says “Please check that we attached for account information” which is poor grammar as it’s a randomly generated phrase from a series of words input by the scammer. The message has an attached pdf file that claims to be an invoice for you to check but no doubt contains malware and/or a phishing link. Never open such messages – go to your PayPal account directly (not from links in an email) if you need to check anything.
“Dear Patriot, we are now giving away FREE PM2.5 Breathing Masks to everybody affected by the Coronavirus”. Sounds good but is a lie. The message claims that the masks are worth $79 each but are currently free. There is a worldwide shortage and no-one gives them away randomly. If anyone did have actual masks and could afford to give them away they would do so at their nearest hospital or care home or to key workers. A simple scam.
Ms. Ileana Corea, Import manager at SADOWSKA-MAZUREK SP. Z O.O. in Poland wants details of my deliveries to her company. She’s especially interested in the weight of each item. This appears to be nonsensical as we have never heard of her company and do not ship goods anywhere. However, it is a typical message from scammer trying to find out which of the random email addresses she is sending to are valid company email addresses. Never respond to such messages as it will just result in that email address being sold to more scammers.
“Military Source Exposes Shocking TRUTH About Coronavirus And The 1 Thing You Must Do Before It’s TOO LATE” is a typical scam email title. The 1 thing you should do is delete such pathetic emails.
A message that starts with a medical warning then goes to offer a ludicrous scam alternative. “Statins and Type 2 Diabetes Risk”. It’s true that there is recent research that shows a link between people who are overweight and have elevated blood sugar and take statins and that combination of factors in people can give a higher risk of developing diabetes type 2. This doesn’t mean that the statins cause the increase. However, the scammer is trying to frighten people into stopping taking statins and that could be life threatening. The scammers alternative is a ‘weird’ Greek trick that reverses diabetes. No. It’s just scammer lies.
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The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a 1998 United States copyright law that implements two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization.
It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures that control access to copyrighted works (commonly known as digital rights management or DRM).
They are the guardians online of copyright material and are best known for being able to take-down websites where people have copied other’s content and not removed it when ordered to.
A “DMCA Takedown” is when content is removed from a website at the request of the owner of the content or the owner of the copyright of the content. It is a well established, accepted, internet standard followed by website owners and internet service providers.
Any owner of content has the right to process a takedown notice against a website owner and/or an Online Service Provider (e.g. ISP, hosting company etc.) if the content owner’s property is found online without their permission.
There is list of takedown conditions:
when copyright infringing content is removed or “taken down” from a website, by the website owner, upon receipt of a DMCA Takedown Notice from their ISP / Hosting company. This notice is generated by the, or on behalf of, the illegally published content owner, distributor, publisher etc.
when copyright infringing content is removed or “taken down” from a website by the website owner upon receipt of a DMCA Takedown Notice from the, or on behalf of, the content owner,distributor, publisher etc.
when copyright infringing content is removed or “taken down” from a website by the by the ISP or Hosting company of the website that is publishing the infringing content. This occurs because the website owner has not voluntarily complied with a DMCA Notice and the ISP or Hosting company must comply with the Takedown notice.
when an infringing website is taken down or “offline” by it’s ISP or Hosting company. This occurs because the website owner does not voluntarily comply with a Takedown notice as described above.
These Takedown actions occur upon receipt of a DMCA Takedown Notice which uses stipulations laid out in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. (DMCA). This Act directly addresses the take down of (copyright) infringed content from a website which is publishing content in violation of copyright protection act or content being used without permission or not in accordance to the sworn statement of the content owner.
If you have needed to get a DMCA Take-down, do let me know, by email.
There are lots of scam emails trying to entice people to sign up for Amazon Prime at full price or a discount and these are mostly phishing emails – trying to get your confidential information.
This latest one takes the opposite approach.
The title is “This email confirms the Amazon Prime Subscription”
This email confirms the Amazon Prime Subscription
Hello [name]
Product Name: Amazon Prime One Year Plan
Receipt Date [date]
Payment Method: Amazon account
Membership price: 179
This subscription will automatically renew unless you turn it off no later than 24 hours before the end of the current period. To cancel auto-renewal or manage your subscriptions click below and sign in.
Cancel and Refund Amazon Prime
The link is to a website designed to look like Amazon and it collects your name and password to send to the scammer and tells you the money will be refunded, but of course that bit is untrue.
This is just a phishing scam to get your Amazon details.
Interesting that the scammer used the wrong price for Amazon Prime – it costs £79 not 179 as stated in the email.
It’s sometimes too easy to half read an email and if it looks legitimate to act by clicking the button – but don’t do that. Always read very carefully before clicking a link in an unsolicited email.
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Website owners are always keen to know how much “traffic” their site gets i.e. how many people visit the site, which pages they read etc.
We all know that some of the traffic on the Internet is fake, but most website owners hope it is a small percentage of the real traffic. However, some companies in the field of advertising believe that up to 50% of traffic achieved through advertising could be fake.
In this context ‘fake’ means it’s not a person looking at your website – it’s another computer.
This is the reason why so many websites these days insist you answer a Capcha query (click the I’m not a robot button) to prove you are a human being.
Fake traffic is traffic generated by software not by humans. Fake traffic is used to artificially inflate ad revenue by making a site’s audience appear greater than it is in reality.
If an advertising network identifies a website’s traffic as fake, it will likely result in suspensions or even bans on the publisher’s advertising account.
How To Identify Fake Traffic
This is a complicated matter and needs expertise, but you would start by examining the statistics for the website :-
A very high bounce rate can indicate a lot of disinterested visitors or bots (computer programmes rather than people)
A very low pages/session figure can mean people attracted to the site are only interested in one link then they leave. If combined with a very short average length of visit can mean automated viewing not people.
Geography: If your website is in English and you get large amounts of traffic from countries where English is not typically used much, that can indicate suspect traffic.
A sudden unexplained increase in traffic can be welcome but if it doesn’t make sense e.g. no extra purchases or comments then it may be caused by automated systems scanning your website.
How to Stop Bots Accessing Your Website
Using a CAPTCHA to ensure visitors are human rather than computer is a good start and there is a file on your website called robots.txt which tells bots whether or not they are allowed to access the website. (Check on the Internet for how to access and edit this file on your website). Reputable business bots will access and obey the instruction in robots.txt but scammers, spammers, hackers and many others will ignore it.
If the fake traffic problem is seriously impacting your website and customers, then there are online services that will filter out such unwanted traffic but that does cost of course.
All sites attract fake traffic and the more popular a site then typically the more fake traffic it will get.
If you have any experiences with this problem, do let me know, by email.
