How Scammers Use Marketing

The radio station has been receiving emails about a cure for Tinnitus for months.

Lots and lots of these emails and interestingly they are not just copies from the same email address but show Marketing skills.

So, one day there were four such messages – all clearly from the same scammer.

But named as being from Krystal, Amanda Alexander, Jan Morris and Cliff Robertson.

Scammers don’t bother doing things one at a time so she will have software that generates random names, probably pairing up randomly from a list of first names and surnames.

Next day another four emails and this time from Emilia, Stanley Mayes, Gilbert and Nancy Clarke.

Third day from Sean Lewis, Orville Beck, Donald Hughes , Sylvia and Brooke.

And so on each day.

The email addresses these are actually from follows a pattern as a syllable then a hyphen then a syllable then .date as the suffix. E.g. curst-fay.date,  alice-sib.date. This changes each day to make it harder for people to block the sender.

How about the actual contents of the messages?

These are well written i.e. no grammatical or spelling mistakes and neatly laid out on the page using colour, bold, underline and different fonts to present an attractive easily read message.

There are two basic messages

  1. MAKE THE RINGING IN YOUR EARS STOP

“Doctors usually said it was impossible, however once her ears were silenced and the ringing was gone they were stunned.

All she did was drink this and it went away fast.”

  1. For decades doctors believed tinnitus was an ear problem.

“They were wrong.

Studies performed at leading universities around the world revealed that tinnitus is actually a brain problem that destroys the auditory cortex.”

For all the effort this scammer puts into his messages, it’s a pity she cannot find a better way to earn a living than sending out dumb messages about tinnitus.

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How To Grow New Balancing Cells in Your Brain

This scam targets people with a weakened sense of balance. This normally means elderly people.

First of all – there is no such thing as balancing cells.

You learn at school that the semi-circular canals in your inner ear respond when n your head changes orientation and that information passes to the brain and you recognise that your head has changed position.

There are no secrets to this.

The email claims that “Scientists can’t explain why this insane method passes every lab trial…”.

It goes on to say that 856 Vertigo patients were tested and each of them had to eat this weird fruit every morning for 2 weeks.

Supposedly, the results were unbelievable and each participant had an increase of up to 97% in new balancing cells.

I’m sure you’ve heard of this outstanding breakthrough No?

That’s because it’s all made-up.

The scammer wants you to click a link to see proof.

It’s all ridiculous. There are established ways to treat people with recurrent dizziness or vertigo and eating so called ‘weird fruit isn’t going to do it.

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Western Union Repay Scammed Money

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the US Postal Inspection Service have been investigating Western Union who are a wire transfer company.

Western Union is often used by fraudsters as payments through Western Union cannot generally be tracked.

Western Union has admitted to aiding and abetting wire fraud and failure to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering programme and agreed to pay $586 million. That money is now being used by DOJ to give refunds to people who were tricked into using Western Union to pay scammers.

Victims of fraud who paid money to scammers via a Western Union wire transfer between 2004 and 2017 could apply for a refund.

There was a limited refund pot and there were thought to be 100,000s of victims, so not everyone got all of their lost money back.

The refund scheme covers any form of wire transfer fraud which involved making a payment via Western Union, so if you sent money to someone who wasn’t who they said they were, or you didn’t get what you were promised in return for a transfer you made, you can apply for a refund.

The process to get a refund did take years altogether but a great many people received all or part of the money scammed from them.

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The GoDaddy Data Breach

GoDaddy is a strange name for an American Internet company, but they are well known in the US and UK as they provide Internet domain names and web hosting for more than 20 million customers worldwide.

However, the email addresses of up to 1.2 million active and inactive Managed WordPress customers exposed in a data breach.

The company say they identified suspicious activity in the Managed WordPress hosting environment and immediately began an investigation with the help of an IT forensics firm and contacted law enforcement.

They notified the potentially affected customers that their web hosting account credentials had been compromised by an “unauthorized individual” who had gained access to login credentials that meant they could “connect to SSH” on the affected hosting accounts. SSH is an acronym for secure shell, a network protocol used by system administrators to access remote computers. SSH is, as you might imagine then, quite a useful attack vector for hackers.

Which Accounts Are Affected

The GoDaddy email said that the breach is limited only to hosting accounts and did not involve customer accounts or their personal information. It noted that no evidence was found to suggest that any files were modified or added to the affected accounts but fell short of mentioning if files had been viewed or copied. However, all impacted hosting account logins have been reset, and the email contained the procedure customers need to follow in order to regain access to the hosting accounts concerned. GoDaddy has also recommended, “out of an abundance of caution,” that users audit their hosting accounts.

GoDaddy said it will provide free security services to those affected for a year at no charge.

“On April 23, 2020, we identified SSH usernames and passwords had been compromised by an unauthorized individual in our hosting environment. This affected approximately 28,000 customers. We immediately reset these usernames and passwords, removed an authorized SSH file from our platform, and have no indication the individual used our customers’ credentials or modified any customer hosting accounts. The individual did not have access to customers’ main GoDaddy accounts.”

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

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