Stupidest Spam of the Week Arthritis Cure

Many scammers offer products, practices, regimes etc. as cures for arthritis. All things that have zero benefit or marginal benefit at an inflated price.

If you need help with arthritis, you should talk with your doctor or take medically certified preparations or exercise and activity regimes.

This latest scammer follows the “keep it vague” approach.

“Use this unusual technique to eliminate arthritis pain in one minute”.

“Grab this and squeeze it twice over the affected area”.

“Wait one minute and the pain will be gone”.

Quite ludicrous. All lies.

There is a link to watch to see how effective this magical technique is.

No thanks.

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September 12, 2020

Time-Wasters Update

An invitation arrived by email to the radio station, apparently from Unilever. They are asking us to quote for supply of hospital ventilator machines. Yeah Right! Some scammer has gone to the trouble of buying domain name unileverglobalprocurments.com just for sending out these scam messages. Requests for tender that don’t match the products a business sells usually means the scammer is extremely lazy and is just looking for any kind of reply from surprised companies too dumb to realise its fake. Bad news.

Another fake invoice arrives at the radio station. This one makes no attempt to say what the invoice is for, just that it must be paid immediately to avoid penalties. The bottom of the email claims it is from Sheila Lugg, Finance Officer at MAAT but the senders email address is mail @ nrownifi.com. A standard scammer message that obviously wont be paid.

An email from Shawna Goudie claims to offer zero cost advertising forever free and contains a link to a website which does not exist. This scammer has forgotten to make the fake website before sending out the spam messages. It all sounds ridiculous and is to be avoided.

“Important Notice – Fix Incoming Email Issues” is the title for a phishing email message. It claims that multiple incoming messages are being rejected and we must connect to our email portal to recover the messages and fix the problem. There is a link which looks like it’s the radio station website but of course it isn’t. Just an attempt to get us to use our login and password on their fake screen.

Michael Reed wants me to accept bearer bonds worth £50 million from a client of his who died with no one to claim the money. The email is actually from malexjamass @gmail.com which doesn’t match his name, suggesting it is a scam but we know that already as someone offering a fortune to people they don’t even know the name of, is obviously fake. No thanks.

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September 11, 2020

Protect My Work

If you produce creative work, then you have an automatic copyright on that work.

This is to deter people from copying your work and claiming it to be their own.

You don’t have to do anything to start this copyright cover – it is automatic.

However, if someone copies your work and pretends it is theirs – how do you prove that you created it first?

That can be a real problem and there are various ways around that, but two web designers became fed up with pitching work to clients who then copied it and gave them no credit or payment.

So, they created a service called Protect My Work at www.protectmywork.com

This can cover-

Logos & marketing material, logos, website design and content, manuals, course material.
Music, songs, sound and lyrics.
Art work, designs, drawings, illustrations, photos, paintings, sculptures.
Dramatic works, videos, film, tv, dramatic works
Literature, books, blogs, poems, articles, plays, screenplays, scripts.
Software, apps, websites, code and databases

You can register your work at any time on Protect My Work but it is most commonly used before publishing work in the public domain on social media and websites.

Step 1 is to create an account at Protect My Work

Step 2 is to upload any relevant documents or simply email documents to their automated system

Step 3 is when they receive documents, each receives a unique reference number with a date stamped digital certificate to help prove your copyright under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This copyright covers the UK & Ireland, all of the EU countries and all countries that signed the international copyright treaty called The Berne Convention (a total of 178 countries).

The automated system records the time and date the work was submitted and ensures that all work is logged and credited to its rightful owner while backing up and securing all data.

On receipt of the documents, the date of submission cannot be altered and is therefore an extremely reliable source of copyright protection by proving the original work, with the time recorded.

Protect My Work do not need to read the documents.

Once you are a member, you can use their copyright protection logo on your work.

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

September 10, 2020

File Type Malware

Scammers send all sorts of messages with attachments and those attachments can contain malware.

Everyone should know that’s it’s potentially dangerous to run a programme supplied by an unknown person or company without being able to verify it is safe, but the scammers attach all sorts of file types in their messages in the hope of coning you into opening them.

Numerous file types can be used by scammers to infect your devices, including-

Compressed files. Most commonly compressed into TAR or gzip format but any other compression can be equally dangerous as the scammer attempts to get around malware scanners.
Microsoft Office documents containing macros
Executable programmes in any computer language e.g. javascript
PDF files
Disk images in ISO or IMG formats
Web pages – asp, html, php etc.
Scripting languages e.g. shell

There are many more less commonly used file types that scammers also try to send out.

Make sure you have up to date anti-malware on your devices and if warned that a file may be unsafe to open – do not take risks.

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

September 9, 2020

Who Makes Cold Calls

Claims management companies (CMCs) make most of the cold calls – PPI, accident claims, investment plans etc.

The insurance company AXA surveyed people to ask about the cold calls they receive in 2018

The biggest subjects for cold calls were PPI, accidents in public places, accidents in the workplace and motor insurance claims.

An estimated 12 million Britons are cold called per day – despite stricter rules and the recent Government crackdown.

These companies are ‘bombarding people with cold calls, emails, letters and text messages’ and ‘clearly contributing to be the bane of many people’s lives,’ according to the report from AXA.

Around half of the 2,131 consumers asked by AXA said they think the regulations around CMCs need to be significantly tightened up.

Possible changes with significant support include:-

Cold calls from CMCs to be made illegal
A cap of less than 10 per cent charge on the fees that CMCs can make, compared with about 30% that they currently charge.
Make it mandatory for calling companies to show the numbers they are calling from
A time limit on when consumers can claim back compensation after an event (most people think this should be 12 months).
A ban on automated calling

A quarter of people surveyed said they felt stressed by these calls from CMCs and 44 per cent were concerned about how the companies had got their details.

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