Category: Warning

Stupidest Spam of the Week Website Links

Everyone with a website or blog wants lots of people to see it. There are many ways to achieve this but helping people to find it on search engines is the most popular method for most people.

One of the ways to improve the likelihood of a website coming high in Google search or other online search engines is to create lots of backlinks i.e. links from other people’s website to that one.

These should be created properly i.e. by getting links in sites related to yours and where the link is relevant and meaningful e.g. a link to Brooklands Radio from a retailer who plays Brooklands Radio in their premises or from an artist featured on Brooklands Radio or from a local business that advertises on Brooklands Radio.

However, lots of unscrupulous people try to bypass this slow process by buying links from link sellers. They charge typically $20 – $50 for hundreds of links to be created.

These are usually very poor links in that they are from sites with no relevance to your web site and probably stuffed with hundreds or thousands of such meaningless links. Google and other search engines recognise this and ignore any links from those sites.

This latest email says “We provide guest post and link placement on our fitness and health site for $95 per link”. 

That’s extremely expensive compared to other link providers.

No-one in their right mind would actually pay this, especially as the email is from a Gmail account which means there is no business and no business website, just a dumb scammer.

The last line in the email says “The price is negotiable.” which reeks of desperation.

Too bad, loser.

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OneCoin Cryptocurrency Scammer in Court

Mark Scott, a US lawyer accused of laundering proceeds from the OneCoin cryptocurrency – alleged to be a Ponzi scheme scam – went on trial in New York. He was accused of laundering approximately $400 million through hedge funds and transferring that back to his colleagues.

OneCoin claims to be a digital currency similar to Bitcoin and the founders are thought to have raised an estimated $4bn worldwide, including millions from the UK, since it began in 2015.

It was founded in Bulgaria by Dr Ruja Ignatova, who disappeared in 2017 and her brother Konstantin Ignatov, who ran the company in her absence and has since been arrested in the US.

The Sales Pitch

Dr Ruja, told her audience that the future belonged to cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, which had made millions for many investors and were free of the high cost of traditional banking.

She offered an alternative – a perfectly safe cryptocurrency of her own devising called OneCoin. She exhorted people to join this financial revolution that would become bigger than Bitcoin within a few years

It is estimated that up to 70,000 people in the UK may have invested with OneCoin and hence lost everything.

It appears to have been a fraud from the beginning as investors trying to retrieve their money found out, when they couldn’t get anything back.

The banks realised it was a scam and stopped doing business with OneCoin. So Ruja moved to using money laundering with people such as Mark Scott.

The officials are keenly trying to find Ruja to put her on trial as well.

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

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Twitter Pay for Followers

On Twitter, there are lots of profiles that advertise they will get you thousands of extra Twitter followers for a fee.

There are also such ads on spam mail, websites etc.

This is quite legal of course, although disliked by Twitter.

e.g. CheapFollowersLikes.org – offers several packages including 100 Twitter followers for $15 or 2,500 followers for $50.

There are numerous other such people making similar offers.

It may seem a good idea to get more followers the quick way – more people will see your blog or website, may attract even more followers and if you’re selling something then you need to get followers.

BUT, people who find your Twitter feed, like it for whatever reason and decide to follow you are the people you need and are likely candidates to work with you, buy from you etc.

However, if you buy followers, then these are very likely to be

  1. Robot accounts i.e. no real person
  2. Fake accounts setup simply to get paid for following
  3. Entirely useless to you as there isn’t a person there interested in you
  4. A problem for Twitter who may regard you as a spammer or criminal causing this problem

Get More Followers

If you want more followers, then the obvious starting point is to create more and better content that people will want to see and tell their friends about.

Twitter adverts –Twitter shows your selected posts to more people.  These people may, if your content is appealing, choose to follow you and you only pay Twitter for each new follower. No money wasted.

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

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What is Pharming?

Pharming combines the words “phishing” and “farming” to indicate large scale phishing attempts.

Phishing is online fraud where a scammer tries to trick you into giving them your personal information e.g. login and password, bank details etc. The scammer does this by pretending to be someone you would trust – e.g. a government department or a high street brand or BT or British gas etc.

The scammer gets you to click a link, believing it is to a reputable organisation but it is the scammer’s website and will steal your confidential information.

Pharming is the large scale version of this and involves either downloading malicious code to your computer which then redirects your browser to the scammer’s website, unbeknownst to you. Or it can involve changes to your Internet router that again automatically redirect your browser without your knowledge.

The Panix Attack

On 15th January 2005, the domain name for a large New York ISP, Panix, was hijacked and redirected to a website in Australia. The domain was restored two days later and ICANN’s review blames Melbourne IT. It appears they received a  DNS change request and did not did not get express authorisation from the registrant in accordance with ICANN’s Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy.

Protection Against Pharming

Make sure you have strong passwords in place, anti-virus and anti-malware installed and staff are trained to avoid suspicious websites, links in emails, not to open unexpected attached files etc.

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How to Check a Financial Web Site is Genuine

Imagine you want to find the best place for your savings or the best place to invest a windfall or the best pension scheme available, for example.

You might go to a professional financial advisor or to your bank or other finance organisation you know.

But if you don’t have the money for an advisor then it might be a case of asking friends and relatives for their opinions or just using a search engine.

However, when you get to searching online, there is a huge number of finance organisations online and many criminals create fake websites that sometimes look exactly like the ones for genuine businesses.

Q. How do you tell which websites are genuine and which are fake?

The starting point is to ignore unsolicited emails, text messages, calls etc. – these are very likely to be fake and should be ignored.

Things to Look For

  1. Check the message and website looking for mistakes
    • Correct URL e.g. Barclays Bank rather than Baclays Bank
    • Use of broken English
    • Simple spelling mistakes or serious grammatical errors
    • The content on the website doesn’t make sense
    • Pictures, diagrams etc. that fit in with the rest of the site and haven’t just been added at random to fill space.

2. Open the Google Transparency Report webpage.

https://transparencyreport.google.com/safe-browsing/search?hl=en_GB

Click the “Search by URL” field in the middle of the page and type in the Internet address for the website you want to check. Google will tell you if it can find anything dodgy about the website.

  1. Check the company on the Companies House website at https://www.gov.uk/get-information-about-a-company
  2. Check for reviews online about the business and check anti-scam websites

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CLC World Free Holidays

We all remember the Timeshare explosion in the 70s with millions of phone calls, endless adverts and more to entice you into signing up for a Timeshare i.e. to buy a share of a holiday home, typically for one or two weeks per year.

The idea being that only paying for a couple of weeks must be a lot cheaper than buying your own holiday home and maybe cheaper than hotels and villas etc.

But, for whatever reason, Timeshare sellers went for the hard sell but combined it with getting people into a situation where they found it difficult to say no. They often gave people a free evening somewhere nice or even free holidays in sunshine resorts. However, the pressure to buy was relentless and many people ended up buying a timeshare just to stop the salesmen bothering them.

That all came to an end as the publicity over high pressure selling and the ability for people to cancel within 14 days according to law made it less profitable for the sellers.

But they didn’t go away completely and CLC (Club la Costa) are sending out mass emails and making phone calls to tell people they have won a free holiday. This is the Timeshare scam.

To claim your free holiday, you and your partner must agree to attend a 90 minute presentation (probably 2 hours or longer) at a CLC World Travel Centre in the UK.

You pay a £90 deposit up front to guarantee your attendance (which will be refunded when you have attended the full session). After attending, they offer you a free week of accommodation at one of their holiday sites, sometimes plus a voucher for Marks & Spencer or other high street chain, for about £50.

At the presentation they may offer a one to three year ‘trial’ but with destinations and dates. If you do commit to a long term membership, you’re likely to find that school holiday dates will have to be booked years in advance and the holidays you want simply aren’t available to be booked. Many people admit they felt bullied into signing up and then immediately cancel when they get home.

Is It a Free Holiday?

Yes. But you have to pay for your own flights, food, insurance etc. You will have to be very flexible – you may not get to travel on the dates, to the location or from the airport that is convenient for you.

During your free week’s holiday you must attend a resort tour and presentation (if you don’t, you will be charged for the accommodation. The presentation is again high pressure and they want everyone to sign up.

There are reviews of dealing with CLC and going on their ‘free’ holidays’ available on Money Saving Expert and TripAdvisor.

e.g. 1 I went on a CLC trip to Tenerife. Had to pay own flights and transfers. We had to go to the presentation for about 6 hours and it was very boring and wasted a day of the holiday. Other than that we got a nice apartment and weren’t given any hassle. If you can get cheap flights and don’t mind one very boring day then it’s ok for a cheap holiday.

e.g.2 If you’ve signed, got a few thousand on credit to pay, you go home. You then read every thing and find they never told you that you also pay £400 a year for fees.

Maybe a Timeshare suits you so why not take advantage of the free taster holiday. But for most people it’s too restrictive and too expensive when all costs are added up.

Plus, although they promise you that selling a Timeshare is easy – hundreds of thousands of people have found that it’s virtually impossible to do and that makes the Timeshare worthless.

If you have any experiences with Timeshare sellers – do let me know, by email.

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