The Norton Security Scam

Norton supply security software and have a great reputation.

The scam email is a simple attempt to look like an automatic payment has been taken as subscription to Norton products.

The email is from marshalleberhardtqc713 @gmail.com which is obviously a random email address and not Norton.

The message makes little attempt to look genuine – no company logo or address or text copied from genuine Norton messages.

The message is straight forward text rather than using colour, attractive fonts etc. as this is easier for the scammers.

It says that $499.99 has been taken as the subscription charge today.

Strangely it says ‘There is no requirement of any special kind of permit for performing this function and the subscription has been renewed automatically’.

Obviously, there is always a requirement for agreement by the customer to any payments.

Then it says ‘Our sincere hope is that you will renew our services’.

That makes no sense as the message says they have already taken the renewal charge.

The point of the message is to get people worried enough to phone them and complain. No doubt the scammers have a scam call centre setup waiting for such calls and will try to get people’s financial details supposedly in order to refund the charge, but in fact just to steal from them.

Don’t fall for tricks such as this.

If you ever need to query a payment – find the contact details of the company yourself and contact them. Do not trust email addresses, phone numbers etc. in unsolicited emails.

The scam number they use is +1 (800) 796-8784.

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

June 13, 2021

Stupidest Spam of the Week Free Coffee

On the Internet there are endless Marketing templates – for spam emails, ‘landing’ pages on websites, blog posts, articles and everything else to do with Marketing.

This is good in that it spreads knowledge but it’s also bad that a lot of scammers and spammers simply copy these for their own underhand purposes.

A latest spam message arrived at the radio station offering ‘Do you want to receive coffee cups for a whole year”.

There is a very nice picture of a lot of coffee pods and coffee drinks”.

‘We are giving away free coffee…. “

The template is designed to be used by spammers, giving them a supposed valuable giveaway to encourage people to sign up with them.

But the spammer was too dumb to use the template properly.

The From address is meant to be a business email account that sounds vaguely legitimate, but instead shows ‘@syntax error”.

The footer of the message was supposed to show a company address but instead shows “PLACE HERE YOUR COMPANY DETAILS ALONG WITH…”.

It was also supposed to have an Unsubscribe link at the bottom of the message, but that’s missing as well.

Stupidity prevents people from setting up their spam messages correctly but doesn’t stop them from sending out the pointless messages

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June 12, 2021

Time-Wasters Update

Manuel Franco tells me he won $768 million on the Powerball lottery 2 years ago and has now decided to give away chunks of it to five lucky winners and my email address is one of the winners. I just have to contact him at a different email address to collect my winnings. The psychology is simple – specifying the Powerball win of such a huge amount of money makes the recipient think of that sum and hence any chunk of it is likely to a great deal of money. Of course, it’s all fake as the fact that his email address is a rubbish one (tropmet.monsoons.miss.res.in) in India, not America as he claims. No-one gives away money to people without even knowing their names.

Mr. Phil Rankine offers me a floating loan at 2% interest with no collateral needed. He uses a info.com email address which is a general purpose address for people wanting to stay anonymous. (e.g. scammers). Anyone offering loans for any purpose with no guarantee and a 2% interest rate would soon be bankrupt – but then he’s a scammer so he’s not worried about that.

A “William Blake” claims to work for the biggest digital marketing agency in the UK but doesn’t mention the name. That’s remiss of him and his email address is a Gmail account rather than a business email address so it’s just lies. He’s even spelled “experts” in his email address as “exparts” suggesting either the email address at Gmail that he wanted was already taken by someone else or maybe he’s really poor at spelling.

A short simple email from ‘George McConnell’ who claims to work for the UN Foreign Office, tells me that they have authorised payment to me as compensation/winning and I just have to reconfirm my personal details. He doesn’t know my name or anything else other than an email address and his email address looks like it belongs to a real estate company. There’s no real attempt to make the email look genuine and there’s a world of a difference between being paid compensation for some event or action as compared to winning something – the two do not go together. A pathetically dumb email.

A message from Fitzpatrick F. More to tell me a long story about how he’s dying of cancer and wants to give away what’s left of his fortune after his money grabbing family got most of it. His remaining $5.6 million is for me to give to charity and keep a big chunk for myself. He’s not competing very well with the many other Advance Fee scammers – I expect at least $200 million for the 1 hour effort needed to give millions to charity.

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June 11, 2021

Which? Scam Statistics

Which? Magazine recently started a scam sharing service, as they call and have released their first statistics on the scams reported to them.

These show-

Telephone scams – 36% of contacts
SMS test scams – 31%
Email scams – 22%
Online – 7%
Social media – 3%
Letter – 0.7%
Doorstep – 0.3%

It’s not surprising that doorstep scams are very rare in the days of the pandemic, but it is surprising that such a small percentage of scams reported were started on social media.

Other data suggests that many criminals have moved their illegal activities online during the pandemic so online fraud is more prevalent than ever.

Take care, especially online and do sign up for the Which? Scam alert service

at https://conversation.which.co.uk/money/scam-alert-service-email-announcement/

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

June 10, 2021

Premium Mobile Phone Service Scams

Ever since premium cost mobile phone numbers were first made available, there have been scammers offering fake services or services of poor quality, excessive charges or with contracts you cannot cancel.

Today, there are numerous rules to stop these scammers and many countries have regulators to control these premium services, but scammers persist as for them it can be an easy way to make money and then disappear.

The basic idea is for the scammer to lure people into either signing up to a paid service they don’t actually want or to make calls using premium costs numbers not realising they are being charged.

Premium Rate Call Back

Scammers either leave a message that sounds important urging you to call back or leave a text to have the same effect. If you call back you will be charged at a high rate per minute and sometimes the recorded message goes on for ages in the hope the victim will stay on the line.

Alternatively, some scammers phone but disconnect within a couple of seconds i.e. before the call can be answered or may leave no message in the hope the victim will assume it was important and call back.

For businesses, scammers leave a different type of message to create an urgent response e.g. a caller wanting to confirm a booking or a query over a delivery or a late payment etc. They say anything they can think of to get the victim to call back. This scam also used to work with fake fax messages but those and few and far between nowadays.

Premium Rate Quizzes, Surveys etc.

You get an unsolicited text message inviting you to enter a competition for some big prize e.g. the latest iPhone or a TV etc. To enter, you just have to return a text message. But that return message will be at the highest rate the scammer can charge and many people send the message without realising the cost.

Alternatively, the scam text might have a link to click which takes you to a scam website that will try to get your personal information as that can be sold to other scammers and well as charging you.

Answering the questions may take multiple text messages from you and each will be charged.

Where the scammer actually creates quiz questions, the first few questions tend to be very easy and the last one or two that you need to answer correctly to win the prize are virtually impossible to get.

Also common in this scam is a request to fill in a survey for which you will receive a valuable gift or even payment.

The scammers make money by charging extremely high rates for the text messages you send, and any further messages they send to you. These charges will not be made clear to you. You may also be automatically subscribed to ongoing charges and not discover this until you see your next itemised phone bill.

The scammers typically run these scams for a while then shutdown and disappear with the money before the authorities can find them.

Premium Rate Connections

This scam tries to snare people who are searching online for telephone numbers of government services and similar respected services such as breakdown call outs, that are heavily used.

They pay for adverts and try to get higher on search engine listings than the actual government page achieves.

The scam is that they do connect you to the actual government service but charge you for that whereas the call would have been free if you’d called the government line directly. Plus, many of these scam services manage to keep charging for the entire call.

You will be put through to the right advice line, but will be paying a very high and unnecessary connection fee.

How to Stay Safe

Do not respond to text messages or missed calls that come from numbers you don’t recognise.
Look out for numbers that start with 19 or 190 as these are premium rate numbers and you can be charged even for reading a text from some of these numbers.
You can ask your telephone provider to bar premium rate services to and from your phone.
Do not give your mobile number to websites or in response to unsolicited emails unless you are sure it is safe to do so.

If you are unsure of what it will cost to call back a telephone number, you can find out the cost of a premium rate number at https://psauthority.org.uk/for-consumers/service-checker

There is a UK regulator for premium rate phone charges – and you can complain to them if you feel conned over use of these numbers. The regulator is at https://psauthority.org.uk/

Refer to https://www.gov.uk/call-charges for a list of charges on outgoing calls and texts.

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

June 9, 2021

How Spammy Are Your Emails

https://www.mail-tester.com/

Do your mail messages end up in the recipient’s spam folder or marked as spam by their email provider?

There could be various reasons for this e.g. you are a spammer or have a badly setup email provider.

But there is a web site you can send a message to and it will analyse the email routing etc. to see if there is anything that makes it look like spam.

The software engineers behind mail-tester say:

“We needed a cheap, simple and efficient way to quickly test the quality of our own newsletters.

We simply built on our own tool. Now we’re sharing it for free via our web-interface and enable you to include our tests in your own app and whitelist our service by creating an account”.

How does mail-tester work?

Mail-tester generate a random email address each time you access their service.
You send a message from your favourite Newsletter/email software to this email address.
You click on the Check Your Score button and as soon as we receive your message, our snail graphic will stop to give you your spam score.
Mail-tester will analyse your message, your mail server, your sending IP… and show you a detailed report of what’s configured properly and what’s not.
Your result will be accessible for 7 days with our free version or 30 days if you created an account and used your own prefix.
If you send a new message to the same testing address, your previous test will be immediately deleted to be replaced by the new one.

So, if your emails are disappearing into spam folders, then mail-tester may be able to help.

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