Stupidest Spam of the Week FBI Payout

This is yet another 419 scam using the name of the FBI.

419 scams are where the scammer promises great riches and the victim has to pay a small amount to retrieve the riches, then another small amount and so on till they realise it’s all just a scam.

This one claims to be from Christopher Wray of the FBI Anti-Terrorist And Monetary Crimes Division but is from a gmail personal address so is an obvious scam.

The message claims that the FBI have discovered that I won $7.4 million USD from a Lottery Company outside the United States of America and the FBI have paid the winning amount to the IMF (International Monetary Fund) in my name.

The message is to ‘Dear Beneficiary’ so they don’t know my name and of course the IMF is nothing to do with lottery winnings.

To get the winnings I just need to pay $250 by Western Union money transfer to a clerk, but such transfers are loved by scammers as the money is untraceable and any transfer cannot be reversed.

The FBI do not use such money transfers.

The end of the message is supposed to look official but this scammer is too stupid to do it properly and it’s a jumble of words trying to look like a job title and even includes “[Photograph of Director]” where the scammer should have put a fake photo.

Pathetic

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BT Call Protect

BT Call Protect is BT’s free service to help their users block out the scam callers, cold callers and other undesirables.

Nuisance calls take many forms – they can be malicious calls, unsolicited sales propositions, scams or simply someone dialling the wrong number.

Getting nuisance calls at home can be intrusive, may disturb your home life and, when they happen repeatedly, can be upsetting.

For BT home phone customers, BT Call Protect is free and works in three ways:

  1. BT blacklist: Numbers identified as nuisance callers by BT’s experts are added to a BT blacklist and sent automatically to your junk voicemail.
  2. Personal blacklist: If you get an unwanted call you can add the number to your Personal blacklist. All future calls from that number will be sent to your junk voicemail.
  3. Individual call types: Send calls from specific categories (such as withheld or international) straight to your junk voicemail.

Features

  • BT Call Protect is easy to set up

All new and existing BT customers can opt in at bt.com/callprotect. Once it’s set up  you can manage your settings  and add phone numbers to your personal blacklist by going online to bt.com/btcallprotect or by calling 1572 from your home phone (no charge) at any time.

  • You control who calls your phone

If you get an unwanted call hang up, dial 1572 and follow the simple instructions to add the last number to your personal blacklist. All future calls from that number will be sent to your junk voicemail.

You can also choose to send international, withheld and unrecognised numbers to your junk voicemail further reducing the amount of unwanted calls received.

  • BT’s Expert knowledge

BT has a team of experts based in Oswestry who identify nuisance calls and create the BT blacklist. Numbers on this blacklist will be sent directly to your junk voicemail. The team is continually updating the list with new unwanted numbers, so you can be sure it’s up to date. The blacklist also includes the phone numbers of scammers detected by the BT Security team.

The list is continually being updated and new numbers added, helping to reduce the number of nuisance calls.

Alternatives to BT Call Protect

There are various products on the market that can block unknown callers etc. The most well known is truCall but Gigaset and Panasonic also make home phones with call blocking features.

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LinkedIn Phishing Scams

LinkedIn is the social media network for business people, with over 500 million subscribers.

Generally, users trust LinkedIn more than the other social media services as it has had more real content, less advertising, people behaving better e.g. not posting offensive material and so on.

However, scammers have noticed that people trust messages from LinkedIn more than say from Facebook and aim to take advantage of that.

Scammers may send messages claiming to be someone interesting, but commonly they hijack accounts and use them to send what appear to be genuine messages from real people.

Protect Your Account

  • Limit the contact information on your profile – do not include sensitive information such as home phone number or address.
  • Don’t click on suspicious links – links in any unexpected message should not be clicked on.
  • Think carefully before accepting a connection request from anyone you don’t know in the real world. LinkedIn is great for building a network, but you must know who’s in it and whether they are safe.

Phishing messages are now very common on LinkedIn. These are where the sender pretends to be someone you would trust e.g. a LinkedIn worker or someone from a large well-known business.

They try to con you into giving away key information or financial information or enough personal information to sell to other scammers and identity thieves.

 Warning Signs of a Phishing Message:

  1. Messages containing bad spelling, grammar, and that aren’t addressed to you personally.
  2. Messages asking you to act immediately.

Common message titles include:-

  • Subject: Account Suspended
  • Subject: LinkedIn Closing & Termination of your Account
  • Subject: LinkedIn Profile Security Alert
  • Subject: YOUR ACCOUNT WILL BE TERMINATED

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

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What are Data Brokers

Data brokers, also known as information brokers, collect personal information, package it into bundles, and sell it to advertisers or other third parties.

On the Internet, we are effectively giving away huge amounts of personal information by using search engines, posting on social media, accessing websites that track us, using mobile phone APPS, buying and selling etc.

We give this information away freely  but often don’[t understand how that data is used – sometimes for our benefit but often to help businesses sell more to us and scammers to take from us.

Data brokerage relies on this freely available information that they can collect, package and sell on.

They may collect information on purchases, preferences, habits, location, travel, income, pastimes, health issues, relatives and friends and much more. This collection of data can be used by advertisers to target adverts at you. Some people prefer seeing more relevant adverts and other people find it creepy that searching on Amazon for a product can lead to that product then popping up in adverts on other websites you visit.

It is also likely that this information paints a false picture of you, at least in part.

For example, if you search online for pregnancy items for your sister, buy dog food for the neighbour and signed up to a social media group on marital arts by mistake then you are likely to get adverts focussed on your new baby, your pet dog and martial arts equipment.

Information Sources

There are numerous sources of data on us, but the most common accessed include:-

  • date of birth
  • address
  • property sales
  • who you live with
  • relatives
  • friends
  • income level
  • purchases
  • marriage licenses
  • arrest records

The Data Brokers sell to advertisers, finance companies, landlords, prospective employers and many more.

Make sure they only have the information you want them have, by restricting what you publish about yourself online.

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Fake Offer of Website Articles

If you own a website, you may get people contacting you offering to write articles for your site.

This is often people looking to be paid for the articles and that is OK.

Sometimes it is people wanting to write articles without pay – they want exposure for their work or just to have their name and writing on a known website.

But there are also scammers who offer this service and they want to steal from you.

A recent email starts with “I am David & I am currently working on an online campaign with a client who would be interested to post an article on your website. The article would discuss topics relevant to your readership and include a natural link to my clients website.”

The senders email address is david.outreach0 @gmail.com which is obviously a personal email address rathe than a business email address so that tells you the message is a scam.

Plus, “…topics relevant to your readership” means the sender has no idea who this email is going out to so is very likely to be part of a mass scam mailout to random email addresses bought on a spam email list.

If the message was genuine, then it would be tailored to the receiving company not for random email addresses and the author would anticipate a reply by email.

However, the email contains a link which is a goobledegook one and tells me to put in my details at that address.

No thanks – keep your scam.

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

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