Various dodgy sellers offer an emailing service that supposedly sends your emails to the contact form addresses from websites. These messages get through company spam filters generally but of course the companies do not want spam messages sent to them this way. A recent set of emails advertising this service comes from a personal Gmail address and insist on chat contact using Whatsapp or Skype or Telegram. They offer to send 1,000,000 messages for $49 so you can why the Internet is filled with spam.  There’s always repulsive people looking to make money from this kind of cheating. Never use services like these.

Emails arrive offering a new completely free online dating service. But, the emails are from an address that should be a Belgian hotel rather than a dating site, so it’s just a scam to get people to sign up to a non-existent service and inputting your personal information just hands it to the scammers to use for identity theft. Never sign up for services unless you are sure they exist and are completely safe.

Scammers send out lots of emails with malware attachments. That malware will try to infect your computer if you make the mistake of downloading and opening the attached file. This latest one targets people who use Quickbooks which is an accounts system for small businesses. It says ‘Quickbooks Notification’ and claims the attached document is a spreadsheet sent to you using a Xerox workcentre. It claims to be an xls file but in fact is xlsm which means it has macros enabled. That means the scammers can add malware into the spreadsheet and make it activate as soon as the spreadsheet is opened by the victim. Never open such attached files unless you expected it and take precautions to ensure it is safe before opening it.

“We got your recommendation from one of our partners here in Italy. We have an urgent need for some of your products and would like to place a trial order with you for them today. Kindly revert back to us to enable …”. This is the ridiculous message in an email from “Giovanni”. The email is just to find out if the email address is a genuine company and if they are dumb enough to reply to what is obviously a fake message.

Another fake payment email arrives. This one claiming to be from HSBC Advising service but is in fact from solomonadj.com which is clearly not HSBC bank. The supposed attached payment slip is in fact an HTML page which is no doubt loaded with malware or a phishing page. Never click on such links.

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