Tag: spam

June 18, 2016

An Update on Those Time-Wasters

So, what rubbish emails and calls have there been to Brooklands Radio station in the last few days?

An email titled “‘How to Photoshop your food and drinks to make them look stunning webinar” –What? You must be kidding.

An email about an APP for employee engagement – Any business that wants to interact with its staff through an APP doesn’t sound to me to be worth working for.

The Hottest Weight Loss Solution. Get your free bottle today – Yeah right! Another sad scam. This one from the Ukraine.

An email asking for volunteers supposedly from the Volunteer Centre in Surrey – but no content in the email after the title. Just a link to click on that is labelled Unsubscribe, but clearly is a scam.

A message from Barclays Bank wanting to pay us $1.2 million from the United Nations- but the real email address it’s from is [email protected]. Not exactly Barclays Bank. Just another pathetic scammer.

These people just waste our time and clog up the Internet with rubbish.

June 11, 2016

What are those Time-Wasters Up To Now?

So, what rubbish emails and calls have there been to Brooklands Radio station in the last few days?

1.An email offering the chance to win £650 Tesco vouchers – although the email claims to be Clubcard Account, it’s from tjoempamail which is a lead generation company so it’s a con.

2. An official notification that our online banking service is going to be deactivated if we do not verify our profile within 24 hours – of course there is a link to click on. The email claims to be from Barclays but is from test.com so obviously a scam.

3. An email offering to improve out energy costs. Just more rubbish from a lead generation company.

4. A message from Google offering to help get us started with advertising through Google. Only the email is actually from a domain name eloc-google.com which is not part of Google, just some scammer trying to con people.

5. A message from the Abu Dhabi Investment council. Impressive. They want to collaborate with us on new investments. It’s a lengthy email setting out how they operate and doesn’t promise sky high returns. Of course it’s just another pathetic scam, although it is written better than most.

These people just waste our time and clog up the Internet with rubbish.

May 18, 2016

Email Marketing – Professional or Spam?

You can buy millions of email addresses for a few hundred dollars and you would likely find that most of them are rubbish or out of date and useless.

But there are reputable Marketing agencies that strive to use email Marketing in a more considered and professional manner.

We received an email from a professional online Marketing company in Manchester offering to use their contacts database and create an email campaign for us.

It says an average campaign of 10,000 emails costs £415 including design of the emails, follow-up emails and website data.

This is not something we would ever use but you can see why so many companies do go down this route and try email marketing.

The key point really is use a professional business to do the work for you and pay a sensible price.

Don’t go cheap rate – you’ll only get rubbish.

May 7, 2016

Latest Time-Wasters

So, what rubbish emails and calls have there been to Brooklands Radio station in the last few days?

We received a series of emails that are bounce back messages as the email address was in error i.e. the email address they were sent to doesn’t exist or is over limit. How did this happen? We didn’t send the emails. Some scammer ‘spoofed’ our email address and sent out the messages. Spoofing means to make an email look like it came from someone else. This is very difficult to stop.

2. A message in French saying someone had left us a voice message on a site named kjiji. – Just a scam.

3. A message from Amazon saying our order has been dispatched, with a zip file to open. Yet another stupid scam message.

4. A message from a debt collection agency offering to collect our outstanding debts – we’re a volunteer organisation. No debts. But they didn’t bother to check of course, just fill the Internet with spam messages.

5. An email titled ‘The Quickest Way to Obtain Funds Generated From the Internet” from a Mackenzie Cremor (that’s a great fake name). The email is just a series of links to random websites. It looks like this spam is intended to tell if the email address is Live i.e. if they don’t get back an error message then they know it’s a real email address. Time-Wasters.

These people just waste our time and clog up the Internet with rubbish.

April 30, 2016

More Time-Wasters

So, what rubbish emails and calls have there been to Brooklands Radio station in the last few days?

A mailshot by a company in property refurbishment. Irelevant to us, but an understandable mistake as it’s not obvious to the sender whether we own our building or just rent.

An idiot who keeps sending us emails about fuel cards for our staff. There’s no unsubscribe button on the email which means she is unprofessional and she keeps sending these emails despite being told we don’t have vehicles.

A basement waterproofing company sending special offers. Could be genuine but the company has a .xyz domain name which usually means an organisation that doesn’t fit the normal .com .co,.uk .org etc. classification. Plus the second half of the email is hundreds of random words which means the sender is trying to avoid being classed as spam. Therefore it must be spam.

A scam email about losing weight. Obviously a scam as the link in the email is actually about home equity and the email address is a .website domain – not used by proper businesses.

A finance company offering asset finance. We’re a volunteer organisation. No loans, but they didn’t bother to check what kind of an organisation we are – just sent out the blind mailshot.

These people just waste our time and clog up the Internet with rubbish.

April 28, 2016

This is Nasty: Investment in Burial Plots

We received an email at the radio station titled “Rainham Cemetery – 40% Returns within 24 months”

They want to make money somehow from a cemetery. That’s worrying.

The email is from KT Marketing and seems to be genuine.

It says “Purchase one of the last available burial plots in Greater London, well below market value.

Returns paid within 24 months. Burial space to run out within 10 years in the South East.”

So, they seem to be saying that there are few burial plots left in London so buy them now and sell them back to the people who will be desperate to get one for their beloved relatives and thence have to pay exorbitant prices because of nasty little horrors who’ve bought up the few remaining plots.

How could you sleep at night if you made money off the back of bereaved people.

This is a nasty business.