“I found your website. I would like to discuss a business proposal with you”. Any email that starts by claiming to have seen your website but doesn’t give the URL of the website is likely to be a mass mailing spam message and hence is to be deleted.

Next email says ‘You will shop free at Morrisons soon with a £500 voucher”. This is a well-known scam whereby the message offers a free shopping voucher but in fact just leads to a survey and no-one gets a free voucher. Morrisons don’t even make £500 vouchers. The message contains “Dear #Firstname#” which means the scammer doesn’t know how to do mass emails correctly.

A message claiming to be from HMRC but the email address is actually hmrc-payert-gov.uk which is nothing to do with government. The message says I owe £11,621.10 according to their records and I need to pay immediately. I should check the attached EXCEL file for details. Unfortunately EXCEL files can contain macros which may harm your PC or install unwanted programmes so never open an attached spreadsheet file.

Bankline have sent me a warning that they think someone has accessed my account from a suspicious location.  What location is that? Maybe it’s where the scammers are who sent this message. However, I don’t have a Bankline account so is of no concern and I wont be opening the attached file supposedly containing the details.

The laziest scammer ever may be using the email address john @smarten.xyz as he keeps sending out huge volumes of blank messages. In reality, the messages are simply to see which emails he bought from a hacker are real rather than invented by the hacker ad to see which gullible people actually send him a reply asking why the message is blank. Those people will then be added to a suckers list.

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