Author: comptroller

October 29, 2018

Bitcoin Victory Scam

Bitcoin Victory is being marketed as an exclusive offer which will make you a millionaire virtually overnight.

You will see the adverts and links to websites highlighting Bitcoin Victory.

It’s a clever scam based on the sales pitch of making money for no effort with a computer doing the work for you.

To make it more attractive it is marketed as an exclusive club to which only the privileged few will have access (that includes you of course).

The ads and websites typically use fake logos from reputable businesses such as Bloomberg or top banks to give the impression of authenticity.

The scammers behind Bitcoin Victory claim it is an automated trading system that deals in Bitcoins and once you have signed up it will trade your bitcoins and make you lots of money for no effort on your part.

This is clearly untrue as all currency trading is high risk and there is no such thing as a sure way to win and no computer system in the world can predict what will happen on the markets.

They claim it has been in testing and is now open to just a few discerning members of the public as long as they get in fast.

Scams often add false restrictions – you must act now; closing shortly; almost full up etc.

Your ‘investment’ is a minimum of $250 but don’t expect to make millions or ever get your money back if you try it.

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October 28, 2018

Stupidest Scam or Spam of the Week – Sugar Parasites

The title is “Are blood sugar parasites damaging your blood sugar”.

There is so much wrong with that sentence.

You eat food and your body converts the carbohydrates and other components into blood sugar which is used in your muscles as energy.

The concept of “blood sugar parasites” makes no sense. Parasites are living organisms – tiny creatures that infect your body – nothing to do with blood sugar.

“parasites damaging your blood sugar”. This makes no sense.

You cannot damage blood sugar. Your body constantly makes blood sugar from your food.

The email is actually about a cure for diabetes, but the scammer got carried away with poetic notions that are just complete rubbish.

The magic cure for diabetes in this case is supposedly a cooking oil. That is nothing to do with how your body manages its blood sugar level.

(The picture is of a dust mite – not the non-existent blood sugar parasites).

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October 27, 2018

Time-Wasters Update

The message says “Invoice Attached – FINAL NOTICE”. It’s just the usual virus laden attachment from a scammer. No thanks.

Ms Cristy Walton tells me “I have a donation of $5 Billion for you. Contact me for details”. Is there anyone dumb enough on this entire planet to believe someone they don’t know who doesn’t even know their name is going to give them $5 Billion? I hope not.

Email title is “Over 12K All New Shed Building Guides”. You must be joking – 12,000 guides about sheds. Who in their right mind would want that? Nobody. This scammer won’t get much response to that rubbish.

We Raise Any Finance promise instant finance for any business or project. They guarantee to be the lowest price. Yup – scammers can offer any price they want as there is no finance to give. There is no matching website, no business of that name – all fake.

Many scammers offer methods to improve your eyesight and some have stories about American Indians with super power eyesight. This scammer has moved on to Aboriginals with super sight (4 times better than anyone else) and the magic ingredient can give anyone 20/20 vision. It’s just the same old stupid scam under a different guise.

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October 26, 2018

Fakespot Identifies Fake Reviews

The website at www.fakespot.com/ was created to “Bring trust back to the Internet” say the owners.

Fakespot is a data analytics company that wants to change the way people read reviews and similar content.

They believe that authentic user reviews are just about the best thing to come out of the Internet. However, the user review system is often abused by sellers that pay for reviews, by companies trying to make their competition look bad, and technologies that pretend to be real reviewers.

How to Use Fakespot

Fakespot can scan all of the reviews for any product or service you select on Yelp™ or Amazon™, Trip Advisor and Apple APP store and tell you whether the reviews are generally reliable or generally unreliable through the letter grade system.

With so many online shopping options, a strong or weak product review can have a huge impact on whether or not a purchase is made. The credibility of these reviews is undermined by businesses who leave fake reviews for themselves or for their competitors – or by individuals with an undisclosed bias.

Fakespot does not review products so cannot tell you how good a product is, it simply analyses the existing reviews looking for patterns that indicate authenticity or otherwise.

Fakespot uses various techniques to evaluate the authenticity of reviews, including:-.

English language pattern recognition
The profile of the reviewer
Correlation with other reviewer data

The algorithm uses machine learning to constantly improve itself by looking at profile clusters, sentiment analysis and cluster correlation. We use artificial intelligence that has been trained to pick up on patterns. The more data that flows into the system, the better the system gets at the detecting fakes.

Amazon unverified reviews are considered unreliable by Fakespot because when the system associates a product review with a product purchase, that review is from a “verified purchaser”. These reviews are in most cases reliable, since Amazon has already confirmed an actual purchase of the product being reviewed.

But, if an Amazon review is not from a ‘verified purchaser’ there is no way of knowing for sure if the reviewer even used the product. While it is possible that a reviewer could have purchased the product elsewhere and left a review on Amazon at a later date, without purchase verification, it is impossible to tell.

Also, Fakespot systems have shown that most paid reviews come from unverified purchasers.

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October 25, 2018

Google Warns of Government Backed Phishing

From Google security blog at https://security.googleblog.com/

Foreign governments using phishing attacks have been in the news lately. If you receive a warning about such from Gmail, it could well be genuine. You may wish to consider two-factor authentication on your account. There is also the Google Advanced Protection Program if you are a strategic target for such attackers.

One of the main threats to all email users is phishing, attempts to trick you into providing a password that an attacker can use to sign into your account.

Beyond phishing for the purposes of fraud, a small minority of users in all corners of the world are still targeted by sophisticated government-backed attackers. These attempts come from many countries. Since 2012, Google have shown prominent warnings within Gmail notifying users that they may be targets of these types of phishing attempts; we show thousands of these warnings every month, even if the specific attempt has been blocked.

Google intentionally send these notices in batches to all users who may be at risk, rather than at the moment we detect the threat itself, so that attackers cannot track some of our defence strategies. Google have an expert team in their Threat Analysis Group, and use a variety of technologies to detect these attempts. Google also notify law enforcement about what they’re seeing; they have additional tools to investigate these attacks.

Even if you don’t receive such a warning, you may wish to consider enabling 2-step verification in Gmail. And if you think you’re at particular risk of government-backed phishing, consider enrolling in the Advanced Protection Program, which provides even stronger levels of security.

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October 24, 2018

Statistics on Fraud

Government statistics on fraud include analysis by age, qualifications, ethnic group etc. for the year 2016

Age Group	Overall (%)	Men (%)	Women (%)
16-24	4.8	4.8	4.8
25-34	7.9	7.1	8.6
35-44	7.7	8.4	7.1
45-54	7.5	6.7	8.3
55-64	6.4	7.1	5.6
65-74	4.9	5.3	4.5
74+	3.3	4.4	2.4

You can see from these figures that the age group with the highest incidence of fraud is the 25 – 54 year olds. There could be many reason for this but the most obvious is that this group is likely the most financially active and hence there are more occasions where they can be defrauded.

The separate figures for men and women are roughly the same and show nearly the same pattern by age.

The government statistics also include analysis by marital status and this shows little difference between marrieds and unmarried, except for much lower reports of fraud for widowed people. This is likely to be for the reason that this is largely an older group of people and hence less financially active on average.

The analysis by occupation is interesting in that the greatest incidence of fraud is for those in the professional / managerial group. This may be due to these people being more likely to be involved with investments, overseas properties, visits to major events around the world etc. which create more opportunities to be victims of fraud.

There are various other analyses of the data and the analysis by highest qualification achieved shows highest levels of fraud for those with a degree or equivalent. This may be due to these people having a higher level of income or can you think of a more likely reason?

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