Category: Warning

Warning – Employer Match

Recently multiple emails are appearing every day from employermatch.co.uk and the same messages from careercandy.com and wherejobs.co.uk

The titles of the emails are strange, such as:-

  1. Help Requested
  2. Urgent Tesco Openings in Walton-on-Thames

There is no Tesco in Walton-on-Thames and there isn’t one planned.

  1. Urgent ASDA Employment in Weybridge

There is no ASDA in Weybridge – the nearest is about 10 miles away.

  1. Cabin Crew needed in Walton-on-Thames

No airplanes in Walton-on-Thames  that I know of.

Employer Match is not a recruitment agency and does not appear to have any jobs to advertise.

Instead they copy job adverts from recruitment agencies and present them as if their own and send out huge volumes of emails with misleading titles and misleading content.

e.g. one email had a Librarian Assistant as the first job vacancy but if you click on it then the site changes to Retail Choice advertising site, showing an assistant manager job vacancy – nothing to do with libraries.

On the Employer Match website there is a search facility – if you put Library assistant and press search – it tells you there are 1,355 Library Assistant jobs near Weybridge.  I would guess that there are at most half a dozen such job vacancies within the whole of Surrey and it would need hundreds of libraries to employ a total of 1,355 Library assistants.  Weybridge has just one library with only a handful of staff in total.

How does Employer Match make money from their spam emails and website?

That is unknown. It’s possible they get paid for every click from their messages to a recruitment website.

The website claims the company is registered in Poole, Dorset but the home page shows jobs in America and the website seems to be hosted from America.

It does seem to be a strange new form of Marketing that is producing huge amounts of misleading spam messages.

Best avoided.

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Lexapro For Sale Online

The Internet is full of scams and spams about Viagra and herbal equivalents, but recently there have been a lot of emails and web sites trying to sell Lexapro.

This is an anti-depressant  and is widely prescribed.

The scammers and spammers appear to want to convince people that it’s like taking smarties – just buy as much as you want without prescription and take them anytime.

But, Lexapro is a powerful pharmaceutical and must only be taken on the direction of a doctor.

It is dangerous to use any such drug as if it were entirely benign – only a doctor can tell you if this is the right drug for your circumstances.

Common side-effects include:-

  • Constipation
  • diarrhoea
  • dry mouth
  • gas in the stomach

but there are also less common more serious  side effects.

Do not buy drugs on the Internet – you have no idea what’s in the tablets.

And do not self-medicate – trust your doctor.

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Journalist Turns Anonymised Data into Profiles

A journalist and a data scientist secured anonymised browsing data for three million users. They created a fake marketing company to get the data and were able to de-anonymised much of it i.e. they could identify the users.

Anonymised data means the names have been removed along with supposedly anything that makes it possible to identify the individuals.

How is that Possible?

There are various techniques that can be used to identify people in the data, such as:-

  1. Anyone who visits their own Twitter analytics page will have a URL in their browsing record which contains their Twitter username. Find that URL, and you’ve linked the anonymous data to an actual person.
  2. A similar trick works for German social networking site Xing.

For other users, a more statistical approach can be used to de-anonymise the data. For instance, just 10 URLs can be enough to uniquely identify someone. For instance, how few people there are at your company, with your bank, your hobby, your preferred newspaper and your mobile phone provider. By creating “fingerprints” from the data, it’s possible to compare it to other, more public, sources of what URLs people have visited, such as social media accounts, or public YouTube playlists.

Eckert, a journalist, worked up with data scientist Andreas Dewes to acquire personal user data and see what they could get from it. They created a fake marketing company, complete with its own website, a LinkedIn page for its chief executive, and even a careers site.

The pair presented their findings at the Def Con hacking conference in Las Vegas

They made the site full of pictures and marketing buzzwords, claiming to have developed a machine-learning algorithm which would be able to market more effectively to people, but only if it was trained with a large amount of data. Then they asked companies for anonymised data to try on their system.

The data they were eventually given came, for free, from a data broker, which was willing to let them test their hypothetical AI advertising platform.

Another discovery through the data collection occurred via Google Translate, which stores the text of every query put through it in the URL. From this, the researchers were able to uncover operational details about a German cybercrime investigation, since the detective involved was translating requests for assistance to foreign police forces.

Where did all of the data come from?  A number of browser plugins collect data, Google Translate collects data and various websites collect this data.

It is supposed to be anonymised when passed on to ensure no-one can identify the individuals, but this clearly is not true.

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07709 Scammer Phone Number

077009 is a fake mobile telephone number prefix.

If you have been contacted by someone claiming their number starts with  077009, you should be wary as the caller ID has probably been spoofed i.e. your telephone is reporting a false caller number.

Do not answer unexpected calls from 077009 numbers as they are likely to be from a scammer.

The 0077009 numbers have been allocated for use in UK TV and films where the makers don’t want viewers calling up a real phone number and causing annoyance. But some scammers have started to use these numbers in messages etc. so as to hide their real number.

In the USA most films and TV use numbers that have 555 as the central portion as these are easily recognisable as fake.

Most countries seem to have set ranges of fake phone numbers for various purposes.

If you are interested, the website https://fakenumber.org/ lists lots of these numbers.

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Facebook Adverts Target the Family

Facebook is introducing a new household audience feature that will let companies direct adverts to entire families or to specific people within a household. The tool could help aim adverts at people who influence purchasing decisions and other adverts to the people making the actual purchases.

Here’s how it works:

  1. The company selects the audience they want to target
  2. They uploads the custom audience data to Facebook (names and address, email addresses etc.). This may be data from their own systems or purchased data.
  3. They turn on the household audience feature to reach not just the person they’re targeting, but also other people in the same household.

Facebook is open about wanting to shift TV advertising to their platform.  Facebook executives said they’ll be able to identify members of the same household based on data, such as their familial relationships on Facebook, but also based on the frequency of shared check-ins or where they access the internet i.e. clever guesswork.

The tool might also be used to reduce wasted advertising spend. For example, if someone has already bought a household-specific product or service e.g. Netflix subscription, an Airbnb reservation—then based on the customer database, the marketer and Facebook know to stop showing such adverts to that household.

Along with the added targeting, Facebook is adding additional measurement capabilities. This will appear in the Adverts Reporting dashboard and show how campaigns perform in terms of getting results across members of a household. Metrics will include how many households the advertising reaches, along with the frequency at which they were reached. It’ll also potentially show how an advert shown to one person affected a purchase made by someone else.

Examples of how the new feature may be used:-

  1. A husband purchased products from Sonos, so he’s in the company’s customer database. Sonos might then try to influence his wife to get him a gift or their kids to buy him something.
  2. One member of the household who sees a hotel advert in France will find others in the household have seen it too, leading to the family making holiday plans.
  3. It could show parents ideas for their children and husbands the items his wife likes to look at.

This could spoil surprises or even expose cheating partners.

Many people already find the adverts that follow them around the Internet to be creepy. You look at a pair of shoes on Amazon then find every website you look at is showing you those same shoes.  This new Facebook feature could take that creepiness to a new level.

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