Ryanair has complained to the regulators that too many people are booking Ryanair flights via travel agents and that’s causing problems for Ryanair including that some passengers are being overcharged.

This is perfectly legal of course – you can book a Ryanair flight via a physical or online travel agent. Ryanair estimate this to be 10% to 15% of their business – about 25 million flights per year.

They may charge you a premium over the Ryanair direct booking cost – but they do need to make money for their time spent, so is not unreasonable.

Most of concern is that they if they book the flight using their corporate credit card and then the flight is cancelled then Ryanair don’t have the correct details to process a refund and the agent may not pass on the full refund or refund  their own charges.

This is legal, so consider whether to buy a Ryanair flight directly through the Ryanair website or to use a travel agent which may be more convenient but more costly.

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

Criminals keep finding new ways to take advantage of us.

Bitcoins and other cyber currencies are constantly in the news and this has led to endless scam offers of untold wealth from Bitcoins and other cyber currencies. But there’s also a new way for criminals to take advantage of you.

The Creation of New Bitcoins

This is through a process called ‘mining’ and it applies to most cyber currencies.

Cyber currencies use something called the Blockchain to keep a record of the currency and updating that Blockchain uses huge amounts of computer processing. Mining needs progressively more and more computing power to make those updates and this slows down the creation of more Bitcoins for example.

Bitcoin has been in circulation for some years and effective mining requires super computers.

However, hackers get around this by stealing processing power from large numbers of other people’s computers – possibly your computer.

The hackers infect your computer with malware that lets them download data to be processed and upload the results back to themselves. If you find your computer is always slow and seems to be busy doing something you haven’t asked it to do – this can mean your computer has been infected and is busy working for someone else.

The same hacking tool that allowed the Wannacry ransomware to wreak destruction in 2017 has also been used by hackers to take over people’s computers and use them for mining.

Another similar one is called Smominru and makes infected computers mine for the cyber currency Monero. It is thought that up to half a million computers were taken over for this purpose.

Make sure your computer is protected against these attacks through the use of anti-virus and anti-malware, take regular backups in case of data corruption or ransomware attacks.

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You will come across fake website links in emails, on websites, social media, text messages and more.

In this context, “fake” means a link that doesn’t take you where it says but instead goes to some other website or web page.

Why do people make such fake links?

Mostly there is a deliberate intention to mislead – promise a link to one site but take you to a different site where you don’t want to go.

This may be an attempt to infect your computer with malware or to get you to a page you have little interest in or simply to get you to look at a video or a webpage for which the link poster gets paid per visitor.

How to Identify Fake Links

1. On a PC hover the cursor over the link and it should show the real destination URL. If this does not match what the link says then you have a fake link and you should not click it.
2. On a MAC make sure you have the status bar showing first
3. On Android phones you can press and keep your finger on the link and a box will open offering options but at the top it shows the complete link

Shortened URLS

Some webpages have very long addresses and if you’re sending a link to someone or posting on Twitter for example then some way to shorten these links would be welcome.  There are various services on the Internet that can do just that.  Twitter does this automatically for long links.

These shortened URLs make it difficult to identify the destination of the link. If in doubt – do not click.

Very Long URLs and Email Addresses

Most people create short URLs i.e. links as they want them to be easy to remember and to type e.g. fightback.ninja/the-inflammation-scam/

But some large websites deliberately create long URLs in order to make the purpose of the page easy to understand  from the name e.g. www.sheppardsoftware.com/content/animals/kidscorner/classification/kc_classification_appearance.htm

Scammers use long URLs in order to try to hide the true destination of the URL.  E.g. www.customerservice.lloydsbank.768092676414336492872654576277cheapscam.com

That is not Lloyds Bank, but is cheapscam.com

Scammers also use the confusion trick with email addresses e.g. customerservice.lloydsbank.768092676414336492872654576277@78397123719273917cheapscam.com

This is not a LLoyds bank email address.

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