Category: Guidance

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Amazon Brand Protection

Amazon is the biggest retailer on the planet and most of their sales are not actually Amazon products but sold on behalf of other businesses using the Amazon platform and Amazon is a huge target for all sorts of scams and other types of fraud.

Amazon Brand Registry Program

This is Amazon’s way to tie brand owners more closely into Amazon and give them extra functions and services to protect and build on their brand. It is particularly useful if a product maker has multiple retailers selling their products online.

Amazon Describes The Benefits As :

  • It helps a brand to have control over their product listings
  • It ensures that the information given about a product is accurate
  • It helps to increase product sales
  • It helps protect the brand
  • It enhances the brand content
  • It helps improve efficiency
  • It helps to list the products without UPCs or EANs
  • It eases the listing of products
  • It helps create different product variations
  • It eliminates bad listings
  • It comes with enhanced customer support
  • It offers enhanced image search to match any fake logo(s) or product(s) through images

Who Qualifies to Use the Brand Register?

  • Sellers who sell their products under their brand name
  • Sellers who are manufacturers
  • Sellers who are actually private label brand owners
  • Sellers who produce white label products
  • Sellers who are actually distributors and who have the authority to own a trademark’s content in Amazon

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

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Retrieve It Service

“Retrieve It” is an online service at www.retrieve-it.com

It was setup to counter the rise of online brokers who are scammers.

Retrieve-It say:

“After years of observing how trading scams have ruined the lives of tens of thousands of individuals – we decided to do something about it.

Unregistered brokers such as Forex, Binary Options, and Cryptocurrencies usually rely on your fear of losing your investment or an opportunity of making money, fear of the unknown and inexperience.

We can make a difference. Let us show you how.”

Is there a big problem with unscrupulous brokers? Yes.

investment fraud is estimated to cost Americans more than $10 billion a year. It is difficult to know the real figure as it is assumed that many people don’t report such scams for they feel foolish at having been conned.

The website at https://commodity.com/brokers/avoid-scams/ looks at a lot of the scams involved.

Retrieve-It services include:

New online brokers, new cryptocurrencies and new ways of scamming people keep happening and it is difficult for anyone to keep pace with the rate of change.

If you are unsure of a broker you want to do business with or need to recover assets from a dodgy broker – check out www.retrieve-it.com

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

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The Do Not Disturb Function

Most smart phones have a Do Not Disturb function of some kind. This can be very useful for reducing the number of spam calls you get. When enabled, it mutes all calls, alerts and media sounds but you can set exceptions to that rule.

Android Phones Do Not Disturb

Go to Settings > Sound & Vibration > Do Not Disturb

This gives you the following options:

  • Turn on Now
  • Turn on as Scheduled
  • Allow Exceptions
  • APP Rules
  • Hide Visual Notifications

Under Allow Exceptions, you can choose to allow alarms only or customise so that for example repeat callers are OK or calls from specified people or messages from specified people are accepted etc.

Generally it gives you a more peaceful life until you turn it off again.

Apple Phones Do Not Disturb

This behaves in a similar way to on Android.

Go to Settings > Do Not Disturb

When Do Not Disturb is on, a crescent moon icon Do Not Disturb icon will be displayed in the status bar.

If you’ve set an alarm in the Clock app, the alarm will go off even when Do Not Disturb is on.

You can set Do Not Disturb to be on and off according to a schedule. This would for example give you a quiet period each day at the set times.

Under Silence, you can choose to silence calls and notifications at all times or only when the device is locked.

Under Allow Calls From, you can allow calls from everyone, no one, your favourites or specific contact groups stored on your device or iCloud.

If you have any better uses for Do Not Disturb, do let me know, by email.

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How Spammy Are Your Emails

https://www.mail-tester.com/

Do your mail messages end up in the recipient’s spam folder or marked as spam by their email provider?

There could be various reasons for this e.g. you are a spammer or have a badly setup email provider.

But there is a web site you can send a message to and it will analyse the email routing etc. to see if there is anything that makes it look like spam.

The software engineers behind mail-tester say:

“We needed a cheap, simple and efficient way to quickly test the quality of our own newsletters.

We simply built on our own tool. Now we’re sharing it for free via our web-interface and enable you to include our tests in your own app and whitelist our service by creating an account”.

How does mail-tester work?

  1. Mail-tester generate a random email address each time you access their service.
  2. You send a message from your favourite Newsletter/email software to this email address.
  3. You click on the Check Your Score button and as soon as we receive your message, our snail graphic will stop to give you your spam score.
  4. Mail-tester will analyse your message, your mail server, your sending IP… and show you a detailed report of what’s configured properly and what’s not.
  5. Your result will be accessible for 7 days with our free version or 30 days if you created an account and used your own prefix.
  6. If you send a new message to the same testing address, your previous test will be immediately deleted to be replaced by the new one.

So, if your emails are disappearing into spam folders, then mail-tester may be able to help.

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

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How to Understand Website Addresses

Some Internet addresses (also known as URLs) are straightforward e .g www. Amazon.com is Amazon.

But many addresses are more complex and scammers often try to hide their Internet address, by making it look like the organisation they are pretending to be from.

e.g. www.amazon.truesite.com is not Amazon, it is truesite (a made-up name for this example).

Internet addresses are made up of parts (sometimes called labels) as follows:

[Left Hand Side] . top level domain / [Right Hand Side]

  1. The top level domain is – .com or .co.uk or .pl or .biz etc.

This is the country code (e.g. uk for United Kingdom) or generic name such as .biz or .com for businesses or .org for organisations or .taxi for taxi companies or .net for Internet operations etc.

  1. The right hand side after the slash which is after the top level domain is to specify which page of the website and pass parameters to that page e.g. the user name
  2. The left hand side is the part of most interest as it contains the organisations domain name e.g. the FBI in fbi.gov or Barclays in www.barclays.co.uk
  3. The http:// and https:// at the front of an Internet address just specifies that it is a website rather than something else and the ‘s’ means secure although you cannot trust that sites with the ‘s’ are actually secure unless you make further checks.

That left hand side is where scammers try to disguise the real domain name. This is possible because anything that comes before the organisation’s domain name can be ignored (for the [purpose of assessing the security of an address) so scammers can put in whatever they want.

e.g. www.microsoft.support.trusite.com is nothing to do with Microsoft – it’s just truesite.com in fact.

And https://login.office.microsoft.com.truesite.com/microsoft-support/ is just truesite.com again.

So, do look carefully at website addresses before you click on a link and do identify the company’s domain name and not be distracted by the left hand side stuff before the domain name or anything after that slash following the domain name.

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

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What is Doxing

Doxing means to analyse information posted online by someone in order to identify and later harass that person. It is typically used to shame or punish people who would rather stay anonymous, because of their controversial beliefs or because they are making trouble in some way.

Doxing can be called a cyber attack involving uncovering the real-world identity of an Internet user. The attacker then reveals that person’s details online. This can then lead to other people attacking the ‘victim’  online and this can be malicious.

However much we may wish to hide out r identity online, we all leave a trail of breadcrumbs that the determined investigator can use to try to find out our real identity.

Typical methods used to determine someone’s identity may include:–

  • searching publicly available databases
  • searching social media websites
  • hacking
  • social engineering.

The key point of doxing is to find and publish personal information about the victim but it can be done for a wide range of reasons, including: harassment, online shaming, extortion or vigilantism.

Examples

  1. Newsweek writer Leah McGrath Goodman revealed the identity of the anonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto although she was heavily criticized by some for her actions.

Some believe a journalist using doxing is crossing the legal line into harassment, by publishing information about an individual’s private life against their wishes.

  1. The Des Moines Register published racist tweets made by a 24-year-old Iowa man whose beer sign on ESPN College GameDay resulted in over $1 million in contributions to a children’s hospital, readers retaliated by sharing social media comments previously made by the reporter, Aaron Calvin, which contained racial slurs and condemnation of law enforcement.

The newspaper later announced that Calvin was no longer an employee.

3.   In July 2016, WikiLeaks released 300,000 e-mails called the Erdoğan emails (named after the Turkish leader). However, Included in the leak was a lot of personal information about Turkish citizens. The files were removed due to privacy concerns, as they included spreadsheets of private, sensitive information of voters.

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

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