Stupidest Spam of the Week Fountain of Youth

I think this scammer must have been watching an old movie such as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade or maybe an old book.

The email title is “The Truth About the Fat Burning Fountain of Youth”.

They do like to be dramatic in their claims to attract attention, although you would expect that to turn off anyone with more than 2 brain cells.

So, the email goes on to claim that a simple 2 minute ritual at bedtime will shrink fat away and reverse aging.

Hhmm – see what I mean about that movie.

Then it gives examples such as John who melted away 54 pounds of belly fat in no time.

No supplement or diet can possibly target fat in one place on the body – it just doesn’t work like that. You gain fat overall and you lose fat overall.

The fountain of youth is a nice fable and so is the idea of losing fat with no effort – but they only exist in stories. Real life is much harder.

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Macs Scambaiting Tips

Mac loves to bait those evil scammers – playing them at their own game. You can read about Mac’s exploits at http://macsbaitstore.com/tips.html

Here are his tips:-

  • Make a fake persona for yourself before you start scam baiting (name, address, phone, etc.) – this will prevent you from making mistakes that will give you away later to the scammer.
  • Use a free email account for your scambaiting – Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, Live.com, etc.
  • Don’t give scammer any real information – for obvious reasons…
  • Consider using a Virtual private Network to disguise your IP address. If you have a floating IP address from your broadband supplier then this is not an issue as floating IP addresses only resolve back to your supplier – not to you
  • Do not give them your home phone number – try a service such as k7.net for messages or a mobile – I use a number that always rings, then make some excuse why I never answer (at work, store, etc.).
  • You can set-up a “catcher” account to receive scam emails, and a “baiter” account to carry on the bait. This is sound advice, but not always necessary – you can actually copy a scam email you find on the web or bulletin board and paste it to a new email to “reply” to a scammer. They send out so many emails, they will never know that they never actually sent an email to you.
  • Scambait with your eyes wide open – remember, these are criminals you are dealing with and everything that comes from their mouth is most likely a lie. In the course of the scambait, you will be sworn out, insulted and even threatened.

Treat the Scammers the Mac Way

  • Make their lives difficult! Remember, they will have certain documents already prepared, so ask for other documents as proof. They will send you a “Certificate of Deposit” for a bank account – ask for a current Account Statement instead. Explain that a Certificate of Deposit only shows what was deposited in the account years ago, but not what is in the account now. They will waste valuable computer time making a fake document…
  • If they send you a Passport ID, ask for a Driver’s License and vice versa. Notice that the picture on both is usually the same…
  • Ask many stupid questions and make sure they answer every question you have. They will try to stick to their script – get them off it.
  • Poke holes in all of their ideas, theories, and routines. The typical scammer knows nothing about business or banking, so correct them, question them, suggest other methods, etc.
  • Question every spelling error – even if you do understand what they meant. This will also waste their valuable time.
  • Point out all of their mistakes in documents – scammers don’t bother about details so pick them out and demand explanations.
  • Scammers are constantly getting their free email accounts shut down. Don’t let them get away with this without a fight! I like to tell them ‘that I contacted Yahoo when the mail came back undelivered, and Yahoo said the account was shut down for fraudulent activities’ – make them explain that one!
  • When a bait starts to peter out or if you haven’t heard from the scammer in a while – send them a message ‘that you sent the money via MoneyGram, did you get it yet’. Nothing revives a dead bait like the promise of money!
  • Never, ever let them get in the last word! Remember, one of the main goals is to keep them busy – if they keep replying to your insults, they are not scamming someone else!

For more information, have a look at http://macsbaitstore.com/tips.html

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

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Car Key Cloning

According to a recent survey, 43 per cent of drivers “don’t appear to think twice” about handing over their car keys at a garage, airport parking, car-wash, or at a hotel or restaurant. However, very few people would behave the same way with their house keys.

Also, at home, many drivers leave their car keys in clear view or on a table or a hook near the front door. This can be a temptation to thieves who can try to hook the keys on a pole pushed through the letterbox.

These days, car theft is much less of a problem than its peak of around 20 years ago, but there are still tens of thousands of cars stolen each year. Modern alarm systems have made it much more difficult for thieves to steal cars, but the thieves have also become more high tec.

All new cars sold in the UK have alarms and immobilisers and almost always there is double locking.

Security in most new cars uses radio messages transmitted between the key fob and the car – if criminals have access to both the key and the car they can copy the electronic access, and return at a later date to steal the compromised car. This is not always true as it depends how the signals work.

Police say one in four stolen cars are now stolen using electronic gadgets, which send a signal that stops owners locking their doors by remote.

At Home Theft

You may have seen on TV where criminals can use signal boosters to make your car think the car key is next to the car door and hence unlock. If your key is safely away from the front door of your home or better still in a safe metal box then this form of theft doesn’t work.

Avoid storing your keys by the front door – it may not be fail-safe but get into the habit of leaving your keys well away from your vehicle, such as at the back of the house or buy a safe bag or metal box to store the keys.

Look after your car keys or thieves may find a way to relive you of the car.

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

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The Email Spam Providers

Every day there are billions of spam messages sent out. Estimates suggest that number is between 10 and 15 billion per day and rising each year.

A large proportion of these are trapped and deleted by the email service companies but many get through as the systems cannot identify every unwanted message.

You might wonder who can possibly send out so many messages, but you might also have received spam messages offering exactly that service.

e.g.  One recent spam message sender claims to have 2 billion email addresses and you can buy that list, or they will send out your spam messages for you at a cost of $30 per month to send up to one million messages every day. That’s 30 million messages sent out for just $30.

The fact that the cost is so low is why so many people send out their rubbish messages by the million.

The sender of this offer has used a disposable and hence untraceable email address to send the messages and uses a different one for any return messages (milliondata @outlook.com).

We can only hope that one day there will be a way of stopping all unwanted emails but for the time being we are stuck with this inundation of garbage sent by cretins.

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

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The Problem of Zoominfo

There are lots of Marketing companies that specialise in collecting data from multiple sources and matching that data to then sell the results.

This is what Zoominfo do.

You might assume that Zoominfo is part of Zoom – the video sharing service so popular during Lock down, but in fact Zoominfo existed years before Zoom came along. There is no connection.

At the radio  station, we have received dozens of emails from ZoomInfo telling us they are collating our data and plan to sell it. They do provide a way for us to opt out of this data selling.

We do not know the quality of the data they have collected, but the email addresses they used for each person at the radio station are fake. They simply guessed the first name of each person as being the first part of their email address. This is wrong so the many emails received are clearly fake.

How Zoominfo got so many names of the people at the radio station, we do not know unless they actually read our website.

We assume the quality of their data to be very poor, based on the fact that they simply invented email addresses for us. They also appear to think they are meeting legal requirements by offering us the chance to correct our data that they have. However, as the message has gone to fake email addresses, that didn’t work so well.

There seems to be little point in trying to correct the data they have as that will simply lead to more unwanted emails, so we’ll leave them to their ignorance.

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

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