Category: Scam email

December 24, 2022

Time Wasters

Brooklands Radio receives emails claiming to be from Brooklands Radio quite often. The scammers do this to try to get past the spam filters at the email provider companies. One of these messages says “Your email won 2.5million”. Contact us”. It doesn’t’ say 2.5 million what so maybe it’s bottle tops or virus particles. Either way we wont be answering the email which is actually from breezeyvillas.com

“They say vision loss is permanent” is the subject line of an email. It’s designed to create interest so you keep reading but it’s a scam of course. The email goes on to say that opticians and scientists are totally wrong and that all vision loss can be corrected in minutes if you just eat a specific flower they call the eyesight flower. The most common form of vision loss is cataracts and somehow this magic flower is going to turn a yellowed stiff lens in your eye into one of a twenty year old. All lies of course.

There are many many scam emails claiming to be from Chinese companies looking for distributors in this country or offering products for resale. Electric vehicles and batteries seem the most common at the moment for these scams. Hainao Sino Energy want me to tell them where I will build EV charging stations using their technology. That’s not going to happen.

Every day, more of the same messages ‘Your FedeX is Out for Delivery’. No it isn’t. I don’t have any packages out for delivery and certainly not several per day. The emails come from ridiculous email addresses e.g. gt61zpo0999 @gmail.com. It should be obvious to anyone that FedEx do not send emails from that email address.

A message supposedly from the WeTransfer service about a document for me but is actually from solusitoilet.com. That is obviously not WeTransfer. The message says “I hereby shared an important Doc for your review and answer sent you JB-22225-20926 LD COLOR.zip”. Wont be opening that lump of malware.

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December 21, 2022

Paypal Security

The title of the email is “Important Update: Upgrade Your Browser”

The message starts with a warning in large letters.

Action required to continue accessing PayPal.co.uk.

This could easily be a scammer’s email trying to get you to click on a link supposedly to PayPal but in fact to a scammer’s page.

However, these warnings are real. The email is from PayPal and the links are to PayPal pages.

Why the warning?

There is a standard called “The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS)” and it is an information security standard for organizations that handle credit cards from the major card schemes.

They have upped their security requirements from 30^th June 2018 and payment takers including PayPal want to meet that new standard.

The message from PayPal says upgrade your browser but you have to click to get more detailed information on what needs to be changed.

PayPal want to ensure everyone using PayPal in the UK uses TLS 1.1 or better still TLS 1.2 rather than the original TLS 1.0 in their browser. TLS is about how the data is encrypted.

How to Upgrade

This is different for each browser but for Chrome means going to Settings then System then Advanced then finding TLS on the list and ensuring only TLS 1.2 is enabled and TLS 1.0 is off.

The PayPal messages contain links for detailed information on each browser.

How to Check Your PayPal Email is Genuine

Scammers will notice these emails going out from PayPal and likely try to replicate them but with links to their own fake pages.

Check the email is from PayPal.co.uk and not any other domain
Check the links do go to PayPal pages (hover the cursor over the link to see where it will go)
You don’t need to login to anything to make the changes as it’s just the browser settings you will change.
Do I have to follow PayPal’s instructions? Only if you want to keep using PayPal payments.

Stay Safe

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December 18, 2022

Stupidest Scam of the Week Construction

Below is the body of the dumb scammer’s email.

We at Bolt Estimating, Inc are offering complete accuracy in Material Quantity Take-offs and Cost Estimation of projects. Please let us know if you need any estimating services regarding your projects.

Steps:

Send over the plans and mention the exact scope of work.

Shortly we will get back with a proposal on which our charges and turnaround time will be mentioned.

If you agreed to that proposal then we will proceed further with your project.

You may ask for samples as well. Thank You.

The message is obviously a scam

The sender claims to work for Bolt Estimating but his email address is a personal account with Gmail.
He has no idea who he’s sending emails to hence the opening line is just ‘Hello’
Estimating service is a niche market with very companies who sue such a service so sending out this kind of email is unlikely to get a meaningless in more than maybe 1 in a million.
‘mention’ the exact scope of work is phrase that no-one sensible would ever use.
‘you may ask for samples’ – you can get samples from carpet shops and from ice cream makers but sample estimates is a wrong idea.

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

December 17, 2022

Time-Wasters Update

“Do this before you go to bed tonight … a bizarre 5 second Himalayan ice hack”. The instruction to do something simple plus the keywords ‘bizarre’ and ‘hack’ makes you lose ‘huge amounts of weight’ make it very obvious that this is a scam email. Then the email changes to say that you just need some ordinant ice from your freezer and an Alpine secret. NO, it’s all lies.

Stefanie Beimborn sent an email although it’s actually from radio @cheeptickets.com so is obviously fake. The email claims she works for a Kuwaiti investment company offering loans for any purpose at just 3% interest. I wont be replying to such lies.

The radio station gets hundreds of emails every week offering to put the station at the top of the Google listing or to multiple sales by 1000% or to improve the SEO incredibly etc. This latest one is standard “I noticed that your website isn’t ranking as highly as it should for certain keywords in your industry”. The funniest thing about the email is that the scammer picked the name Smith Jones – perhaps he or she is too dumb to realise that Smith is a surname not a first name. Who cares!

Paul Shaw’s email says he wants me to handle a short but urgent task for him. I should reply to him with my mobile phone number. His actual email address is workmeds882 @gmail.com so this scammer cannot be bothered to get an email address that resembles his name. No-one sensible would reply to such an email.

The radio station receives endless fake invoices every week. This latest one (from skilaratech) is a little more detailed than the usual ones. It shows a table of information of previous supposed contacts, documents sent etc. All of the entries are hyperlinks so clicking anything will take you to a fake website designed to get your confidential information. No thanks.

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December 13, 2022

HR Holiday Scam

Many scammers target business workers – perhaps they have more money to steal or perhaps are an easier target if they don’t expect phishing email at work.

But all medium/large businesses and many small businesses train their staff on how to spot phishing attempts.

“Approval Submittal for Vacations on 10/26/2022” is a good title to attract attention. The date format is American and very few other countries use that format of month-day-year so anyone else should immediately spot this is fake.

The email has a series of notes explaining about vacation policy and differences with ‘terminated’ employees and new starters.

But the main point of the email is to get you to click the link which looks like a holiday check document and it has the domain name of the radio station in it to make the link look genuine.

But it’s just fake of course.

How can we tell

The date format is American
We have never worked with the sender’s fake company name
We don’t send out such messages as there is no HR computer system
There’s no name at the bottom of the email
The link is faked as hovering over it shows it goes to a completely different URL.
And so on

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

December 10, 2022

Time-Wasters Update

Yet another offer of a free £500 Ryanair voucher arrives. But Ryanair doesn’t make such vouchers available to anyone – they don’t exist so it’s an obvious fake. It claims that Emma Richardson and Stephen Taylor and an email address at the radio station have between them won the voucher and we just need to reply then the final choice will be made. All pathetic rubbish. Never believe such things, as companies do not give away such value to random people who are not already its customers.

Supposedly, Harvard have a new memory loss breakthrough and the proof is that a 70 year old man who could seldom remember even his own name is now able to remember everything and has laser like concentration. People who suffer from diseases such as dementia or Alzheimer’s lose brain cells and no wonder drug can remake them. Then the email switches to the usual conspiracy rubbish about big pharma losing billions when this almost instant cure is made available to all. Nope – sadly there is no cure.

The next stupid email scam is about magic dieting. Just half a teaspoon of a new extract will boost your metabolism by 728% so it claims. If there was any truth in that then you’d need to sit in an ice bath when taking the product to stop your self overheating and endangering your life. The email then claims the extract is actually lemon juice and sea salt. Very stupid.

A billing receipt arrives from a Gmail account and that tells me it’s just a scam. Any business would have a business email address not a personal one like Gmail, especially for sending out invoices. The scammer in this case is very lazy as the message just contains the purchase order number and nothing else. Lazy and stupid.

“The government has been hiding this from you” is an opening line in a scam email – it’s intended to catch your attention but also tells most readers that it’s a rubbish email. It goes on about a miracle liquid that can turn your body’s pain switch off in less than a minute and has no side effects. You are supposed to use it to stop any nerve pain, arthritis pain or any other form of pain. But pain is the body’s natural reactions to something damaging so turning off all pain is dangerous. People suffering from long term pain may desperately want something to stop that pain and hence fall for this stupid email, but I hope not.

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