Brooklands Radio gets several hundred spam and scam messages per week and below are the most common in one month:

1. People selling drones. Scammers seem to love claiming to sell these. Most have no products – they just take your money.
2. People selling electric scooters and electric bikes – some are genuine sellers looking for gullible clients who wont realise they can buy the same products much more cheaply elsewhere.
3. The ‘Married Women – have an Affair’ scam which is actually targeted at men.
4. Dating sites – also targeted at men.
5. Website builders, SEO offerings, social media management etc. – It seems that half the population of India want to offer website based services online such as website design, SEO services, social media management etc. Probably many are genuine idiots thinking they can get rich from these schemes and likely have little idea of what they are doing. The rest are scammers who believe they can con people confused by technology.
6. Music submissions. It makes sense for aspiring artists and publicity companies to send demos to radio stations. But like most local radio stations, Brooklands Radio is only interested in budding artists who are local – rather than on the other side of the planet as so many seem to be.
7. Phishing emails – trying to get your private information or login/password
8. Malware messages – an attachment of some kind that is loaded with malware if the recipient is dumb enough to open it
9. Pathetic stories of magic answers to diabetes or massive weight loss with no effort etc. – the scammers aim is just to get you to click a link to watch a video and they are paid for each of those clicks.
10. Shed building. For some reason there are still lots of these emails offering free plans for building sheds. Who cares?

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

Around 30 billion emails are sent each day and about half of those are spam in some form.

It is estimated that spam costs businesses many billions of dollars every year in time wasted, security systems, overloaded email boxes and more.

This waste is likely to keep rising as more and more spam is sent and more time is wasted.

About 80% of all spam in North America and Europe is sent by the same roughly 100 spam gangs.

The 100 most active spam operations comprise of around 200-300 individuals who are responsible for the bulk of all spam emails sent around the world. Spamhaus’ Register of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO) documents the names, aliases, and other details of the operations run by these so-called “spam gangs.”

Phishing Targets

Apple IDs are the most popular target of phishing emails, then Microsoft Outlook, Google, Paypal, LinkedIn and many others.

The most common type of phishing scam is the fake invoice and the message tells you to click a link to retrieve some necessary document. That link takes you to a fake web page asking for login details.

Also commonly used are fake orders, payments, problems that must be rectified, special offers and many more.

Always beware of any message that could be a phishing attempt and never click on a link in an unsolicited email