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.

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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

  1. Do not respond to text messages or missed calls that come from numbers you don’t recognise.
  2. 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.
  3. You can ask your telephone provider to bar premium rate services to and from your phone.
  4. 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.

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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?

  1. Mail-tester generate a random email address each time you access their service.
  2. You send a message from your favourite Newsletter/email software to this email address.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.

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Facebook Profile Visitors Scam

This scam involves a series of messages supposedly to warn people of others reading their Facebook profile and offering a way to see who they are.

e.g. “Guess who viewed your profile?”

or “Guess who has unfriended you?”

or “Guess who wants to know more about you?”

Usually these scammers are offering an APP or a service to let you see who has read your profile and charge for that of course.

But Facebook have repeatedly said that there is no way for any APP or similar to access that information, so it’s fake.

Facebook do shut down anyone making these kinds of claims, but that takes time and in the mean time people have fallen for this.

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

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Stupidest Spam of the Week Transparent Mask

This one is about coronavirus masks.

We are all used to wearing masks and/or visors of various kinds during the pandemic – from the disposables to the plain cotton to the designer expensive ones.

This latest advert is for ‘Transparent Face Masks’ which supposedly are new and taking the world by storm.

But of course, they are not new and have taken anywhere by storm.

Many people in hospitality and retail wear visors rather than masks so people can see their faces and so do some people with asthma and other breathing issues that mean they would find it difficult to wear a mask.

Some chose transparent face masks, which have been around since shortly after the pandemic took hold but have never become very popular as for most people, basic cotton feels better to wear especially for long periods.

People who live with or work with the deaf or hard of hearing, do tend to use transparent face masks as lip reading is impossible through a normal mask.

So there’s nothing new about these transparent masks but the moron sending out the mass emails tries hard with benefits such as ‘anti water’ and ‘perfect breathing’ and ‘healthy’.

Wearing masks in the days of coronavirus is certainly safer for your health but doesn’t make any difference whether the masks are transparent or not.

The sender’s email address claims to be ‘Shields’ but is in fact visisupo.casa which should be a Spanish site to do with homes not face masks, so is an obvious scam.

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