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I’m John Counsel, founder and CEO of The Profit Clinic. Welcome to our growing network of resource and support sites for small and home-based business owners and direct sellers. I hope you find it useful in protecting yourself from scams and flim-flam artists of all kinds.

Feel free to report scams and questionable pitches and requests using our Contact form.

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This scam is potentially very dangerous and, while it may be a phishing scam that tries to hijack your Adobe® account, it’s almost certainly going to load your hard drive with some form of malware. The file size of the attachment isn’t large enough to be a genuine Adobe® application, but it’s typical of a malicious script. Typical botnet script approach.

Same old same old, but still plenty of ignorant, gullible, inexperienced, careless or thoughtless suckers who’ll fall for it, even though it’s blindingly obvious.

Typical phishing scam email. All the usual tell-tale signs that rely on the recipient’s ignorance, inexperience, carelessness or gullibility.

Yep, it’s another really clumsy Facebook scam to steal your identity, bank account, etc. Lots of bad English, spelling errors and other obvious stuff — including no email address for the recipient (otherwise it might not match your Facebook email address, right?)

Don’t fall for these obvious scams

Three new versions of old identity-theft phishing scams are doing the rounds…

This latest round of phishing scams target Facebook, Twitter and a range of other membership accounts online claiming that your password or other access details have been changed from 1 November, so you need to either get hold of your new password, etc, or enter new ones.

Yeah… right!

Incredibly, thousands of dummies will fall for this scam, as they always do. Just take a look at this info graphic I received today. Not even addressed to one of my Facebook account-linked email addresses… and includes copies to several unrelated people.

The attachment is a standard phishing scam form asking for all your account info so they can hijack your account and steal your identity.

If you get scammed by this one, you deserve it.

How can you tell they’re both scams? Easy — I have over 160 sites, many with .au domain names because I live in Melbourne, Australia, the World’s Most Liveable City (yep… back in #1 spot again for 2011).

That means I get BOTH versions of this scam, to multiple addresses, NONE of which either the IRS (USA) or ATO (Australia) have on file. Plus one of the versions below actually posts multiple email addresses in the address field (a real bozo scammer).

If you receive any version of this email scam message, do NOT open the attachment.

This is the Australian version of the scam message

This is the US version.

More of the same, except this time is claims to be from YouTube.

Standard-issue phishing scam email claiming to be from Twitter.

Objective: to steal your identity and your Twitter account, and the IDs of your followers.

Clumsy and inept, but still people fall for these really easy-to-detect scams in droves.

More of the usual stuff, which is quite easy to detect if you follow these simple checks:

• Check the “To:” email address. Is it the email address you registered with Facebook?
  Simple solution: Change your email address. Get a new G-mail account just for Facebook. Use it only for Facebook and don’t tell anyone else the details.
• Check the REAL web addresses of all those hyperlinks. Hover your mouse over them (do NOT click!) to reveal the true destination.
  Chances are that the address that appears links to a page hidden on that site by the scammer, who hacked that server.