Category: Fight Back

Don’t Give In to Ransomware Attackers


Ransomware is an attack that locks your computer and mobile devices or encrypts your electronic files. When this happens, you can’t get to the data unless perhaps by paying a ransom.

Paying the ransom is never recommended, mainly because it does not guarantee you will be able to decrypt your files plus it encourages the criminals and gives them funding for further criminal activities.

There are also a number of issues that can go wrong accidentally. For example, there could be bugs in the malware that makes the encrypted data unrecoverable even with the right key.

A ransomware attack is typically as a spam email attachment. Opening the attached file releases the malware onto the user’s system and it goes about it’s business of encrypting the files and deleting the originals. When complete, it puts up warning messages or screens demanding payment or the files will be lost forever.

The Nomoreransom Website

The website is at https://www.nomoreransom.org

“No More Ransom” is a public-private cooperation to tackle serious action cybercrime. The main aim is to share knowledge and educate users across the world on how to prevent ransomware attacks.

Plus, they believe that by restoring access to their systems where possible, it will empower users to take action and avoid rewarding criminals with a ransom payment.

The website contains four decryption tools for different types of malware. These are freely available and  will work for any user infected with the threats listed on the website.

Nomoreransom is associated with and works with various law enforcement agencies and anti-virus companies including Kaspersky, McAfee, Avast and Bitdefender

If you have any experiences with these scams do let me know, by email.

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The End of Keurboom Communications

Keurboom Communications was created by Gregory Rudd for the purpose of making cold calls – illegally.

He had no interest in respecting people’s wishes not to be cold called, he ignored the Telephone Preference Service and he ignored the law.

As a result, his company was handed the highest ever fine for nuisance calling after more than 1,000 people complained about automated calls.

The calls, made during an 18

month period, including road traffic accident claims and PPI compensation. Some people received repeat calls, even on the same day and during unsociable hours. The company also hid 

its identity, making it harder for people to complain.

It is thought the company made up to 99.5 million such calls.

The law says that companies can only make automated marketing calls to people if they have given consent. Keurboom ignored this and called without consideration.

Following the ICO’s investigation, Keurboom Communications Ltd was placed in voluntary liquidation and Gregory Rudd banned for 6 years from being a company director.

How to Block Nuisance Callers

  1. Register with the Telephone Preference Service (TPS) then reputable companies will no longer make sales and Marketing calls to your number.
  2. Use your phone to block repeated unwanted callers and caller ID withheld numbers. Some phones allow you to do this and some services such as BT Call Protect enable this.
  3. Use the magic phone number when a website demands your number. (More information at https://fightback.ninja/a-magic-phone-number-and-call-blocking/)

If you have any experiences with scammers, spammers or time-waster do let me know, by email.

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How to Use Multiple Email Addresses

There are many reasons why having multiple email addresses can be useful, although it does mean more passwords to remember, more logins to lose track of etc. unless you use a password manager to keep track of them.

First of all, many people have separate business and personal email addresses as using one email address for both could be very confusing. If you work or volunteer for multiple organisations then you may have multiple ‘work’ email addresses.

Your personal email address is probably used for communicating with family, friends, colleagues and numerous people you don’t really know but have some dealings with.

Plus, it’s probably used for social media accounts, online shopping, financial transactions and a myriad of other purposes.

Your personal email address is also a security measure – if you forget your password on a website then it will have a ‘click for forgotten password’ link as people frequently forget passwords and the website will send a message to your email address that lets you create a new password.

This means that if a criminal gets hold of your email password (guessing them is easy for a high percentage of people) then she can change your passwords on multiple websites where you have an account and that can even become identity theft where the criminal can take out loans in your name etc. and you have the difficult task of proving your innocence.

Using one personal email address for financial activities, shopping online, social media, email etc. means only one login and password to worry about but also means that if that one email address and password is gained by scammers then you lose control of all of those things in one go.

You can create one email address for each website etc. but perhaps a more practical answer is to have one email address per type of use e.g. one for purely personal use and one for anything financial and one for social media usage and one for anything else.

People use multiple email addresses for such as:

  • An address for each business
  • Each financial activity – banks, credit cards, loan companies etc.
  • Social media
  • Registering on sites you suspect may spam you
  • Registering for downloads where you don’t want to be contacted afterwards
  • Signing up on any site that will send you Marketing messages

If you have any experiences with these scams do let me know, by email.

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Can Victoria Track The Source of Her Cold Calls?

The journalist Victoria Bischoff was plagued by cold callers and wanted to find out how they had got her contact details. She started to investigate but didn’t expect it would take so much time and effort and that the result would involve so many organisations.

She started receiving cold calls to her mobile phone, including from Scottish Power and also lots of spam emails from companies she had never heard of.

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) laws give you the right to ask where these companies get your contact details from, so she started making that request (called a subject access request).

e.g. one request led her to Prize Reactor then to The Secret For You then to Response Concepts then to Green Flamingo who then claimed she had entered a prize draw at 5:20 am one morning, so she knew this to be false.  The data that Green Flamingo had on her was all wrong except for the email address and mobile number.

Green Flamingo claimed by entering the prize draw she had agreed for her contact details to be sold to other companies.

All lies.

There is more to the story – but you can guess that unscrupulous organisations collect email addresses and phone numbers from websites, directories – anywhere they can get them and then add on guessed information such as which house number to match with a postcode.

By this means, information that is partly true and partly made-up circulates among businesses wanting to make money from your details or to send out emails, make cold calls etc.

It is time-consuming and difficult to track down how this happens as Victoria found out.

Don’t give out your personal information to any organisation or website or on social media unless you are sure it is safe. Even this doesn’t keep you safe though as many times these unscrupulous people simply find some information about you online and make-up the rest then sell it.

If you have any experiences with these scams do let me know, by email.

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How is Money Mail Doing?

The Daily Mail and Sunday Mail have a section called “Money Mail” and they do a good job fighting for consumers, revealing incompetence, highlighting injustice and trying to get money back for people who have been conned.

Their review of 2021 shows that they won back something like £1.1 million for their readers.

This included:

  • Scottish Power continuing to take monthly debits from a man forced out of his house due to a fire. They eventually returned £3,600
  • British Gas failing to take a meter reading for 2 years despite being told the smart meter didn’t work
  • Forcing Barclays to refund a £49,5000 mortgage deposit stolen by scammers
  • Covid fraud
  • Travel insurance failures
  • Power companies ignoring their customers

And much more.

If you’re struggling with a bureaucratic organisation and even the industry regulator isn’t much help then maybe the publicity of Money Mail on the case can help.

If you have any experiences with these scams do let me know, by email.

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G’s Problems with Scam Callers

G. received a phone call from someone claiming to be from BT.

The caller told him there is a very important and urgent problem with your Internet router and we need to replace it.

“We will send a new one out to you immediately.”

G. wasn’t impressed and said that he wasn’t interested and goodbye.

The caller tried again – being more insistent this time.

“Your Wi-Fi is sending out dangerous signals and needs to be fixed”

G. is a courteous person and didn’t want to offend but again said he wasn’t interested. “Goodbye”. He hoped the caller would leave him alone.

But next day the caller was back again. This time claiming there were problems with the Internet line and replacement kit was on the way.

G. still didn’t want to be rude to the caller so politely asked him to stop calling, said ‘Goodbye’ And hoped that would be the end of it.

But the caller continued to call 2 or 3 times per day.

G. realised something had to be done so he set-up Sky Talk Shield on his phone.

This service stops anyone calling his number directly.

When you phone his number you get a recorded message from Sky telling you the number you’ve called  has Sky Talk Safe and to say your name and press 2 on the keypad.

When you’ve done that, the service calls G. and plays back the name of the caller. He then chooses to accept or refuse the call.

This service does have a cost but it does seem an effective way of blocking all unwanted callers and solved G.s problem with the fake BT caller.

A quicker way of dealing with this type of persistent scammer is to tell them exactly what you think of them, using direct language – have a good shout, it does you good.

If you haven’t worked out how G. knew from the start that it was a scam call – he didn’t have a BT line, only Sky.

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