On 22 August 2024 at 23:19 Nigel Graham 2 Said:

[…]

I telephoned BT and after the usual ‘Press 8 To Be Driven Up The Wall’ rigmarole made contact with a very helpful lady in Warrington (she said). She confirmed this e-message was fraudulent, the service name is fiction, the sending address not correct for BT.

[…]

Well-caught, Nigel

The Digital Voice moniker is quite legitimate:

https://www.bt.com/broadband/digital-voice

but  after decades as a BT sufferer, I could believe almost any level of incompetence in their communications.

MichaelG.

[ left BT in 2022, and am much happier with Zen ]

You need this https://www.mailwasher.net/ It’s free and it works pretty well.

Spam is part of the environment in the 21st Century. Life is too short to spend time dealing with it on a one-at-a-time basis.

Nigel,

Our experiences with BT evidently differ … so be it.

What I can help you with, however, is this:

https://aws.amazon.com/ses/

Aside from all the physical ‘fulfilment’ services, Amazon is a very big provider of ‘cloud-related ‘ services.

MichaelG.

A bit of shallow digging revealed that ‘Amazonses’ is ‘Amazon Simple Email Service’ – it’s a genuine email handling platform that they  provide for marketing purposes so that third parties (BT, in this case) can do things like sort mailing lists, identify responses, and issue tickets or quantify attendees..

Search ‘what is amazonses?’

On 24 August 2024 at 08:59 Michael Gilligan Said:

On 24 August 2024 at 06:57 Diogenes Said:

A bit of shallow digging revealed that ‘Amazonses’ is ‘Amazon Simple Email Service’ – it’s a genuine email handling platform […]

As linked in my post #748608 above

MichaelG.

Michael’s link contains this Amazonses selling point: Reach more customers’ inboxes as a trusted sender with email deliverability tools and IP management.   The source is more impressive than a fly-by-night hotmail account!   The service is sold to businesses, not individuals, and though I would expect customer credentials to be checked carefully, there are plenty of clever crooks about!

Amazonses isn’t untrustworthy in itself, and I see nothing technical in the email header published by Nigel above to indicate the email from “BT” is a wrong-un.   It’s possible though that someone naughty has managed to fool Amazon, and are now using Amazonses to masquerade as BT.

I’m not sure the BT lady in Warrington gave Nigel good advice!  When ringing a help-line, don’t expect the human on the other end to know anything about corporate IT contracts, or how the email system works!   Unable to prove one way or another that Nigel has a real problem, it makes good sense for BT to tell him not to trust it.

As it happens I also have had a couple of BT emails warming me up to the idea my account will be moved to Digital Voice.   Nothing in the emails I’ve had to suggest they’re not genuine, and plenty to indicate they’re real.   The email header starts:

Return-Path: <01020190eee159e0-a5cd89db-8f13-4bbc-9fb5-4a9df643bb13-000000@eu-west-1.amazonses.com>
Received: from btprdrgi004.btinternet.com ([10.248.67.2])
by btprdfep024.mx.internal with ESMTP
id <20240726115104.SKXI3081103.btprdfep024.mx.internal@btprdrgi004.btinternet.com>

In other words, the email originated with ‘btprdrgi004.btinternet.com’, and was sent to be via eu-west-1.amazonses.com.   The most likely reason BT would do use amazonses rather than send direct is load management.  Switching to Digital Voice involves millions of accounts, and the programme is likely to generate more email than BT’s in-house system is sized for.    Services like amazonses are ideal for providing temporary muscle – rather than spend millions beefing up an in-house system, buy capacity in the cloud on a short-term contract.

Though I suspect this particular example is a false alarm,  Nigel is correct to treat it as a real threat.  He carries the can if it turns out to be wrong, not me!  Better safe than sorry…

Dave

Which is surprising, given the BT operator verbally told Nigel the email was a fake! Who can you trust these days?

Had a phone call yesterday on the ‘land-line’ number, so I was immediately on guard as it’s only the scammers who ever call it these days. A very pleasant well-spoken female voice asked me how I was, to which I replied ‘fine thank you, who is calling, please?’ After identifying itself as some sort of service, the voice then attempted to ask some questions about my house but I gave evasive answers having already determined that I was going to terminate the call at some point soon. However, I did have time to notice a slight delay between my answer and the next question, about as long as it takes you to clear your throat, you might say. It then began to dawn on me that I may not be not talking to a real cold-caller at all but, possibly, an AI generated representation of one and the short silences were the time taken for the program to generate the next question. I can’t be certain but it’s worth bearing in mind and looking out for if you receive such a call, try to notice the slight pauses in the responses as the call progresses. Has anyone else had calls like this?

On 23 August 2024 at 23:04 Nigel Graham 2 Said:

Odder and odder.

 

[…]

 

I am going to report the “Amazon” message as a phishing attempt…… Luckily its message simply asked me for the e-address used by Amazon for the account it thinks I have, so its senders have learnt nothing new.

 

[ my emboldening ]

I really don’t wish to pry, Nigel but are you any closer to getting this matter resolved ?

I’m sure it will ‘go against the grain’ but if you try logging-in to Amazon UK using your eMail address … you will get this ‘pop-up’

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In your shoes, I would simply request the OTP and follow my nose !

MichaelG.