I suspect your friend has had their email ‘hacked’ – i.e. someone has ‘borrowed’ their account for nefarious purposes.

If Amazon are telling you that there is already an account registered to your email address, then try logging-in using the ‘Forgot my Password’ option to see what business ‘you’ have been transacting with them.

Please don’t take this as a recommendation that you should do business with them.

On 30 June 2024 at 08:17 Sandgrounder Said:

I’ve had quite a few from the email addresses of friends which appear correct, but when hovering the mouse over them shows their real addresses usually ending with a .edu,? this mornings offering was from a .edu.tr which will be from some student at a university in Turkey offering photos.

I did have one last year similar to Nigel’s from a friends real address, it was well written but using a style that wasn’t his and asking for help in buying a present from Amazon which I knew he would never do, I rang my friend and he confirmed his email account had been hacked and it took a lot of work to clear it up.

The nastiest I’ve ever had is a few telling me they have hacked into my PC and now control it and my webcam, they have  recorded me watching porn and have made a split screen recording  showing both the porn film and me watching it, they demanded £900 in bitcoins or they would send this recording to all in my address book. I don’t watch porn and don’t even have a webcam so it didn’t affect me but if I did I could imagine it would be a devastating email to receive

John

 

 

John I received the same porn type email sometime back however it came via a email address I hold on the website I run for my club and never been used

H

There is no limit to what a criminal might be prepared to do!  A number of teenagers, judgement over-ridden by fizzing hormones, have killed themselves after being conned into sharing intimate photographs on social media or dating websites.  Then they were told the pictures would be released to their parents, friends, and school unless a large sum of money was sent to the criminal.

The same con is more successful with adults, because they are more likely to be able to pay the blackmail.   Mostly I’m against the death penalty, but I believe the world would be a cleaner place without this sort of vicious criminal.

Anyone reading this into internet porn?  If so, be careful out there.    Human failings are surprisingly common!  Had 8 separate incidents of “above suspicion” staff detected with embarrassing peccadilloes or worse during my career.   An auto-erotic asphyxiation; one indecent exposure; one act of gross indecency in a public toilet; one distributing adult porn to like-minded colleagues using a work server; one storing adult images on a work laptop probably for distribution on the web, but the police couldn’t prove it; one downloading mild porn to his work-computer, a single incident flagged by the firewall; and one home computer stuffed full of child abuse porn.   The last was owned by a member of staff who was a magistrate, who went to jail.   Although he had deleted everything on his hard drive after realising one of the sites he’d engaged with was a police sting operation, the police recovered a large quantity of other unpleasantness.

I’ve no doubt a percentage of my friends and colleagues indulged in foolishness that they would pay to keep private.

Dave

The saddest thing is that a lot of the scammers themselves are slave labourers held captive by people traffickers in massive scam factories, largely run by Chinese crime gangs.

The days of the scammers being some gangster in Nigeria are largely over. There are thousands of unsuspecting good people lured from third world countries such as the Phillipines, India and Sri Lanka who speak good English and are recuited falsely to go to places like Laos and Vietnam supposedly for legitimate jobs as department store managers or company admin officers etc. But when they get there, the traffickers take their passports and lock them up in building full of hundreds and hundreds of similar others and they are forced to work the phones or emails as scammers. Their alternative is to be sold off into the sex trade, or worse.

I was in Southeast Asia a while back and there is a whole town up north by the Chinese border that is full of Chinese gangs, casinos and bars, all the shop signs are in Chinese. It is an open secret that several huge multi-storey office buildings out in the middle of the surrounding countryside are scam factories full of such people-trafficked captives.

Very sad. But governments seem uninterested in doing anything about it, either at our end or the other end.