An angry email from Karen Knight to tell me that I still owe £133.75 and this is my final notice. Never heard of her or the multiple company names mentioned in the scam email and certainly don’t owe her any money. But then she doesn’t exist – just a fake name used by a greedy scammer and I certainly wont open the attached file which is no doubt loaded with malware.

Hooray – a new cure for stubborn fat and it’s a bottle of wine. Or at least that’s what the scammer is claiming – that scientists in Massachusetts have discovered an easy and cheap way to lose half a kilo of fat every day. You just sip of glass of this wine while eating and your fat will drop away, even when you eat whatever you like. Nice fantasy but clearly only a fantasy dreamed up by a scammer.

Citibank International say they have $10.3 million in funds for me due to my wining/inheritance contract payment. The grammar in that last phrase is terrible and I presume they meant to put “winning” rather than “wining”. Even scammers have spell checkers so the mistakes are deliberate and are to ensure only the most gullible reply. An extremely obvious phishing scam message.

A message from the APPLE APP store tells me that a purchase has just been made on my account for Yi-Gi-Oh cards at $23. It’s dated “Janaury” – don’t know that month. There is an attached document I am supposed to open to check the transaction, but I think I’ll give that a miss as it’s very likely to be loaded with malware as the whole message is a simple scam.

Some scammers put a lot of time and effort into producing messages with a least a vague hope of looking genuine, but others go for the simple stupid route, such as “Your ATM Card of $5.5 Million is ready for shipment. Urgently reconfirm your full name, Delivery address and your direct phone number immediately”. If a bank wants to pay someone, they don’t normally send out an ATM card – there are simpler safer ways to make payments. Clearly if the message was genuine they wouldn’t ask me to reconfirm my name as they would know it. Pathetic.

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