An email from Pure Health Remedies titled “How To Treat Your Pain And Ailments In JUST 3 MINUTES?”
So, it’s a typical stupid scam message from a moronic scammer with no imagination.
The message continues with its sales pitch:-
What are the most common ailments that always drive you crazy?
Headaches, sinus infection, cough, runny nose, body aches, nausea and sickness, sore muscles, joint pains, etc.
The 3 minute cure.
Well, I’ve got a SECRET to tell you. I know a “pain-killing” treatment that gets rid of these common ailments.
Then a link to click to learn more.
Most of the health problems listed at the top of the message are not about pain e.g. runny nose, coughing and nausea so no kind of pain killers will be of any help.
The scammer is a moron and so is anyone who responds to it.
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Yet another diabetes cure and this one is supposedly an unusual cooking oil. The ‘proof’ is that someone named Rachel, who almost died from a stroke, cured herself of diabetes just by switching to this cooking oil. If she lost a ton of weight and changed the rest of her diet and took lots more exercise then I’d believe it, but a cooking oil? Nope, just the usual scammer rubbish.
An email from Huyens demanding I reply to a previous email. Just a scammer looking for active email accounts so she can sell the details to other scammers. Never reply to such emails.
More rubbish from the badly spelt doctors at doctoors.club. This time it’s a magic IQ booster that you can feel taking effect in less than 30 minutes. Boost your IQ by 89% and unlock the unused 90% of your brain. Everyone already uses 100% of their brain – just not all at the same time as that would be ridiculous.
An email from Jane tells me she can “make more customers for your business without ripping your pockets”. That sounds a literal translation of a proverb or saying from another language. Poor English or poor grammar is a trademark of many scammers.
Apparently I have a new eFAX message waiting for me. It’s from PACCAR Inc and claims it has been virus checked and found free of viruses. No – it’s a simple phishing email wanting me to click the link then provide personal details so I can get to the non-existent message.
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Four scammers who conned pension savers out of £13.7 million have been banned from the industry and banned from being company directors or trustees. The Pensions Regulator has launched a criminal investigation as these people need to be jailed for swindling so many out of their life savings.
David Austin was the leader of the group and he and his family took most of the proceeds.
The money was spent on lavish living – and only £3.2M of the cash taken was actually invested in anything and that was a risky venture.
David Austin is a former bankrupt with no experience running an investment business, but conned people into investing with him.
The scam starts with cold calling and websites set up to lure pension investors. The scammers created a series of bogus investments including one about growing truffle trees and one about a Caribbean holiday site.
The victims were told their pensions would be reinvested and they would be paid an upfront cash lump sum for making the transfer. They were also lied to that their funds would be put into assets, bonds and HMRC-compliant investments to meet the target return of 5% growth a year.
False documents were used to trick staff at the schemes where the victims had their pensions – into believing that the pension holders worked for companies linked to the scam schemes. This meant the staff were persuaded to allow £13.7 million of funds to be transferred to the scam schemes.
David Austin installed fellow criminals Alan Barratt, Susan Dalton and Julian Hanson as the trustees for the scam schemes and they were then paid to act on his instructions, allowing the scheme monies to be used at Austin’s will. Barratt and Dalton also acted as salesmen for Austin’s Spain-based business, Select Pension Investments, persuading victims to transfer their pension pots into the schemes.
A small proportion of the funds – between 10% and 25% of the amounts transferred – were given back to the victims as their “rebate”, although many victims were assured that this payment was coming from the investment provider not out of their pension pots. More than £1 million was paid to “introducers” or “agents” who used cold-calling to encourage pension members to transfer over their funds.
More than £10.3 million was transferred to businesses owned or controlled by Austin,
A whistle-blower contacted The Pensions Regulator about the scam in November 2014 who then took control of the schemes to prevent further money being removed.
If you have any experiences with scammers, spammers or time-waster do let me know, by email.
Fake Websites – There is a big increase in fake special offers, email alerts etc in the lead up to Christmas as scammers try desperately to attract you to their websites. Most of these fake sites are copies of well known and trusted sites such as Marks and Spencers, Amazon, Bentalls etc. The sites are either phishing sites designed to get your login information or sell poor quality copies of well known products. Be careful visiting any retail websites that you haven’t used previously.
Social Media Gift Exchange – This is a fairly new scam whereby exchanging gifts or purchasing and selling may seem a good plan but scammers turn these into schemes where they make money and everyone else loses.
Grandparent Scams – Scammers target pensioners, pretending to be a grandchild that has been injured in an accident and needs financial help immediately. They hope the emotional impact of a hurt child may lead people to react and send help without thinking though what’s going on or verifying the situation first.
E-Cards – More people than ever are sending e-Cards at Christmas and scammers create fake websites and advertise them on social media to attract punters. But instead of an e-card they take your login details and payment details and make money from you. Be careful using a new e-Card website.
Be careful more than ever online at Christmas.
If you have any experiences with scammers, spammers or time-waster do let me know, by email.
This is a new set of Internet services at https://engaging.works created by Mark Price, the former Managing Director of Waitrose and Deputy Chairman of the John Lewis Partnership. He says that driven by his belief in the potential of happier employees to transform businesses, he has developed a set of simple tools for companies and individuals to use.
The most popular of these so far is the happiness survey.
It’s quick and easy to fill in and measures your happiness level at work compared to others in similar industries.
Marks believes the key factors for happy employees are:
Job satisfaction
Information Sharing
Fair reward and recognition
Empowerment
Well-being
Instilling Pride
There is also a career developer tool, mentor matching, online chats, messenger and more
Mark has big plans as he wants to challenge Facebook and others and he starts out with a belief that the customer’s data belongs to them not to him (unlike Facebook).
We’ll see how well he succeeds as he develops more tools in this market.
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Online blackmail scams are a class of scam emails that attempt to force people into paying money to prevent disclosure of their online activities. The scam works by leading the recipient to believe their computer has been hacked and their secrets recorded on video by the scammer.
The scammer then threatens to release those videos to the public, to the recipient’s friends and family, social media friends etc.
In almost all cases, the scammer knows nothing beyond the recipients email address, so the whole thing is a hoax but it does lead some people to pay up (in Bitcoins, anonymously).
However, some scammers go to the trouble of buying personal details from other criminals to make their blackmail seem more believable.
Imagine you receive a threatening email but the scammer knows your password, which accounts you have, date of birth, family names or similar then the whole hoax becomes a lot more believable.
BUT, the scammer has not hacked your computer – they have simply bought that information. They get their information mostly from data breaches – the hackers sell this data to other criminals.
You may think your details have never been involved in a data breach (as you’ve never been told that your data was compromised) but if you want to be sure then check the website https://haveibeenpwned.com/ and input your email address. It will tell you which (if any) data breaches your email address was involved in and you may be surprised.
The data the criminal has may well be out of date so you may find the password they quote in the blackmail is an old one that you have previously changed, but if the password quoted is currently valid then you need to take precautions immediately in case the criminal tries to use your accounts.
The emails are very general – trying to scare the recipient into believing that the sender has found something that the recipient cannot allow to be disclosed to the public or to their family and friends.
Clearly, this wont work on many people, but for the scammers it’s a numbers game. They hope by sending out huge numbers of these emails randomly they will hit some people frightened enough to pay up.
The email title is something like “Your life can be destroyed – everything is in your hands”
The message contains badly written sentences designed to frighten but be general enough to potentially include as many people as possible.
e.g.
“I uploaded the malicious program on your system”
“I pilfered all privy background from your system”
“I have more compromising evidence”
“After adjusting, your camera shot the videotape of you”
“My malware collected all your social and work contacts”
“When I get transaction I will destroy all evidence in perpetuity”
The scammer wants a payment in Bitcoins and sets a short time limit for the payment.
I hope that no-one responds to this attempted blackmail, but who knows.
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Lots of scam messages offer loans of various kinds as an enticement.
The more intelligent ones offer loans tied to circumstances and ability to repay etc. so as to make them more believable.
But there are other scammers who take the opposite view and offer loans for anything, with no collateral and at virtually zero interest. These are very obviously scams but still some people fall for them in their desperation to get an affordable loan.
A latest set of such scam messages appear to come from Poland (i.e. the domain suffix is .pl)
The title is something like “Your Bank Says No”.
Then the message goes on about how banks regularly turn people away or charge too much.
The link you are invited to click on (labelled as preliminary verification for a loan) is of course to a phishing site. The whole point of the email is to get your personal details so they can used to hack your accounts and/or sold to other scammers.
The email sender is tktelekom.pl which is a non-existent company and obviously a Telecomms name not a bank.
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Email claims there is a common spice you can add to your food that allows you to burn away an average of one pound per day for 21 days without exercising. The only spice proven to induce weight loss is capsaicin found in chillies. But you have to eat a great deal of it and even then the maximum weight loss is of the order of 1 pound in 15 days which is a lot less than increasing your level of exercise can provide.
KCS Consulting send me greetings and tell me they are looking for investment opportunities. Sending out bulk emails to random people is not a good way to find investments, but then it’s all a scam of course.
An email claiming to be from HSBC bank asking me to review the attached documents. They supply a password so I can access the documents. There is no chance I would open any such files – as they are no doubt virus laden.
Mrs Jaqueline Mars wishes to execute a charity project with me and will send me comprehensive details once she gets my response. The email is sent to undisclosed recipients i.e. likely to be millions of spam email addresses. No thank you Jaqueline as you probably don’t exist and whoever is behind the email is just a scammer.
An email titled “Behold is a fine offers for you” and it contains just a link labelled as Fine Offers. If someone has such poor grammar and spelling then only an idiot would click the link.
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Authorised Push Payment (APP) fraud is where a fraudster convinces the victim to transfer money to them, usually under the guise of an authority, the victim’s bank or a supplier. Once transferred, the money is likely to be transferred again and then difficult if not impossible to retrieve.
Traditionally the banks have treated these frauds as being the victims own fault and normally refuse to provide reimbursement. However many of these frauds are very sophisticated and difficult for the victim to know they are being defrauded until it is too late.
Also, the banks practice of simply following instructions and sending money to anyone at any account without any checks means they do little to prevent these frauds and often act too late after they are informed of a problem and the money and the fraudster are gone.
A new draft voluntary code for banks aims to make it more difficult for the perpetrators of these frauds and more likely for the victims to get recompense.
The new code establishes the principle that if customers take “the requisite level of care”, they should be reimbursed by their bank.
However, the code does list eight ways that banks can justifiably refuse to reimburse customers who have been defrauded. These include cases where customers:-
refuse to heed warnings from their bank
“recklessly share” their security credentials
fail to take steps to make sure they person they paid was who they thought they were
fail to be honest with their bank
are “grossly negligent”
fail to heed a confirmation of payee result (see below)
Questions also remain about who is liable when both the bank and the customer appear to have taken all the necessary steps to prevent fraud.
Customers were scammed out of £503.4m between January and June, according to the finance industry’s own research.
Favoured methods include duping victims into paying in advance for a product or service that doesn’t exist or impersonating a trusted organisation such as the police.
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There are lots of scammers sending out messages that claim to be from the FBI and with some long winded story about a very large sum of money due to be paid to you.
You just need to confirm your identity to get the money, but on filling in those details you find out there is a “small” payment needed to release the funds and that’s the scam.
There is no large sum of money just a greedy scammer trying to make something from your greed.
This latest message is from idrf.ca @idrf.ca so this scammer doesn’t know how to make his email address actually look like the FBI.
It claims to be from David Lance Bowdich, the Deputy Director of the FBI who is making personal contact with you over two intercepted consignment boxes at JFK Airport, New York.
“The boxes were scanned and they contained large sums of money ($4.1 million), also some backup documents that bear your name as the Beneficiary / Receiver. An investigation was carried out on the diplomat that accompanied the boxes into the United States and he stated that he was to deliver the funds to your residence as an overdue payment owed to you by a foreign country.
After cross-checking all legal documents in the boxes, we found out that your consignment was lacking an important document and we can’t release the boxes to the diplomat until the document is found, we have no other option than to confiscate your consignment.
The email continues with blather about ownership and regulations, trying to look official.
Then comes the kicker.
You are required to reply within 72 hours or you will be prosecuted in a court of law for money laundering, you are instructed to desist from further contact with any bank(s) or person(s) in any part of the world regarding your payment because your consignment has been confiscated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation here in the United States.
It’s just a scam of course – you cannot be prosecuted for money laundering that you haven’t committed and of course there is no consignment of money, just a greedy scammer.
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