Archive for the ‘Online Scams’ Category

I just received a classic phishing scam email claiming to be from NewEgg.com, which appears to be a prime target of scammers.

What alerted me first was the notification of a charge to my Visa card for a purchase. That’s a problem for two reasons:

• I’ve never bought anything, ever, from NewEgg.com.
• I don’t have a Visa card.

On top of that, all of the links go to a site that displays a 404 Not Found error.

The strange thing is that there’s no working link to ANY site, not even a phishing site. But this could be a simple ploy to test whether or not my email address is accurate and active.

When I contacted NewEgg.com customer service, I was told that it may have been a message sent in error from their order department.

Another possibly-suspicious factor is the return path to an Indian address.

Here’s a copy of the email message:

(*Innocent parties’ domains and names have been obscured. http://putmeonthenet.net is shown because the links are to a non-existent page on that site.)

Same-old same-old scam phishing for your PayPal account info, but with new graphics. As always, hover your mouse over the link to see the REAL destination URL. (Hard to believe that people don’t even do this most basic level of checking before clicking and losing their money.)

I just noticed this scam this morning, although I suspect it’s not exactly a new one.

It’s a basic phishing scam that seeks to steal your Twitter ID and related information.

As usual, the superficial giveaways are…

• Poor English — really simple mistakes in grammar, syntax and spelling.
• Easily-checked fake links — just hover your mouse over the fake Twitter link to see the REAL destination URL.
• Meaningless links — not your real Twitter user name.

Please pass this on to your friends, colleagues, family, etc who use Twitter. Share it online using the button below.

This is a variation of the usual PayPal account phishing scam. A couple of glaring spelling errors helps, along with the fact that there’s NO email address for the recipient in the headers.

Can you see a pattern emerging in all these scams? Think they might be from the same gang of online criminals?

The errors in English used are more subtle in this one, but they’re there. (We don’t point them out: there’s no benefit in teaching better English to criminals trying to steal your money, your identity or your computer.)

This is a common malware/botnet scam claiming to be from UPS. It’s not.

Tell-tale signs include names in the BCC: field (valid emails never display the content of the BCC:, or BLIND Carbon Copy, field — that’s the whole point of that field, to mask the addresses), and really obvious errors in the English used. Punctuation errors, too.

Here’s a phishing email I haven’t seen before. Definitely a scam (I bank with Westpac and this isn’t from them.)

As always with scams, there are basic errors in the spelling, grammar, punctuation or syntax.

Here’s a variation on the “Please view my resume” and “Amazon shipping label” scam I just received (again): it’s a message, claiming to be from my webmail provider (absolute proof that it’s a scam in my case, because I’m the webmail provider!) requiring me to re-validate my — unspecified — account by opening the attachment.

Yeah… right.

In this case, it’s a straight phishing scam aimed at stealing your identity and your webmail account, wherever you have that webmail account (your workplace, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc).

The usual stuff still applies: poor English, literal spelling and really obvious grammatical mistakes, etc.

Here’s an example of the spam message:

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Bot nets are the Holy Grail of spammers, phishing gangs and other malicious individuals and criminal organizations. These are global networks of “slave” computers — whose owners have no idea that their machines are being used to send millions of spam, phishing, adware, spyware and malware messages every day. They may wonder why their computers run slowly, and that available processing resources seem to be strangely low.

How on earth do people’s computers end up being hooked into these worldwide bot networks?

Easy.

They open spam messages with attachments with no idea what they contain.

They download free games, music, videos, screensavers, etc, etc, etc with adware, spyware and other malware (including keyloggers, trojans, viruses and worms) attached or embedded. (Keyloggers record your keystrokes when entering usernames and passwords for everything from your Facebook account to your bank account, then send them to the vermin who sent them to you.)

A current crop is the “Please view my resume (or CV)” scam. Take a look at these messages we’ve received over recent weeks. They all claim to be from different people, but the messages are all the same (including misspelling “quite interested”), they contain attachments all around the same size and you open them at your peril.

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I just received a spam message, allegedly sent by someone in California, offering to send my advertising messages to 44,000,000 verified PayPal account holders.

The whole thing sounds very plausible and attractive, and I’m sure the spammer will make a lot of money from the mindless morons who take up the offer without thinking about it, other than to see dollar signs and overnight success.

WARNING!

This is a SCAM, and falling for it could cost you not only the money you pay to the spammer, but your Internet access, your PayPal account, your email service and your assets — including your home, cars and business.

How do I know it’s a scam?

Apart from long experience exposing scams and scammers, there are plenty of tell-tale warning signs and plain, common sense reasons why this is NOT legitimate. Here’s a short list of a few of them…
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