Author: comptroller

January 14, 2019

The Companies House Invoice Scam

All companies in the UK deal with Companies House but there are few charges to pay apart from once yearly records update charges.

An email claims to be from Companies House but is actually from cp-docs. co.uk and says that some charges were missing from last month’s invoice. A full investigation is taking place to discover the cause of this error and it is expected the missing charges will be on next month’s invoice.

The scammer wants you to click a link which goes to a phishing site and will try to get your login and password details.

You may wonder how a scammer can benefit from knowing your login details at companies House.

The primary reason is to do with identity theft – company directors are a favourite for identity thieves and being able to use your company name to cover illegal activities is highly valuable to fraudsters.

The scam emails look genuine, have the right logo and disclaimer clause and contact details for Companies House.

The messages even contain the same warnings about scam messages as do genuine emails from Companies House.

But these are fake – do not click a link to anything on such an email. Instead, login to your account to check the status and whether you need to take action.

If in doubt – contact Companies House in working hours.

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January 13, 2019

Stupidest Scam of the Week – Transport to China

Andee of Hyun Logistics in Guandong, China want to know the date of my next shipment to China and can they offer a lower bid for the work.

Email Marketing can be effective for some businesses BUT only when they buy contact information from a reputable source and are able to select businesses for whom their products and services are relevant.

We are a radio station so we don’t ship goods to China so why would anyone in their right mind send such a request to us?

Because, like so many people they are lazy and stupid. They think it’s a good idea to buy 100 million email addresses for $200 and send out that many emails. They know perfectly well that the messages are irrelevant to 99.999% of recipients of the emails but they don’t care. It’s cheap and easy and let the recipients decide what to do with the emails.

Sending emails from China means they don’t have to comply with GDPR rules or anything similar.

I hope they get zero business from their emails and a lot of complaints.

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January 12, 2019

Time-Wasters Update

Financial Services Group offer cheap online funding. But their email address is actually @fatdisorders.bid which is not a financial institution. No thanks. You can keep your non existent funding.

Fatloss Insider offers a magic ingredient that gives you 4 lbs of belly fat loss per day and no effort required. The only effort is in paying over money to the scam artist who doesn’t have any magic so you lose pounds from your wallet but not from your waistline.

An email from Henry Riceohnul starts out claiming to be from a ‘real’ girl and tells me I am an ancient God and wants to meet up. The link to click claims to be to ericawhiter.su. This is one very confused scammer.

A message explaining that my email server has been upgraded and some of my emails may have been lost. I need to verify my account urgently so they can recover my emails. The message seems to be from mailserver @servers.com. It’s all lies of course. Just an attempt to get my account login and password.

A message from Shavonda Dubois to ‘All residents in the building’. It claims to have attached an up to date emergency exit map. The link is to a Google document which is new for scammers to use. But it’s just a con to get me to open a document. No thanks.

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January 11, 2019

TSB Punished by Customers

A recent poll by Which magazine shows that TSB is now regarded as poor and rated even lower than RBS and other lenders responsible for the financial crisis.

In February 2018, TSB was highly ranked by its customers as a bank you can trust, but then the sky fell in for the bank when their new IT systems that hadn’t been tested sufficiently collapsed and many customers were locked out of their accounts for days or weeks in some cases.

Some customers had accidental access to other people’s accounts, the bank had little idea of what to do and their communication with customers was poor leaving many very angry at what happened.

To make matters worse, many fraudsters jumped on the bandwagon and began sending fake emails and making calls to TSB customers, leading to a large number of frauds.

The problems led the FCA to begin an investigation with the Prudential Regulation Authority.

Up to 1.9 million people using TSB’s digital and mobile banking found themselves locked out of their bank accounts following the migration of data on customers from former owner Lloyds’ IT system to a new one managed by current owner Sabadell.

TSB CEO Dr Pester told MPs on the Treasury Committee that he took “absolute responsibility” for the problems, but said the migration of billions of customer records was successful “to the penny” and the underlying engine of the bank was “working well”.

Paul Pester lost his job but the damage done to consumer confidence will take a long time to recover.

The problems had a simple cause – inadequate testing of the new systems in order to save time and stay on schedule. That was a bad judgement.

The lesson is clear – do not take risks with customer data as you may end up very sorry.

If you’ve had bad experiences with TSB – let me know by email.