Mean Trick (Phsihing Attempt)

[Nigel Graham 2Participant @nigelgraham2]

I was surprised to receive an e-mail supposedly from a fellow society member – the sending address was “correct” too.

After a couple of pleasantries and an odd remark about being unable to call, “he” asked if I could do him a favour.

Wary, wondering if the “favour” would be one of those fictitious requests for the fare home from somewhere abroad, I sent a direct, new message rather than reply. It evidently still went to the hidden source because the supposed “favour” was that well-worn request to buy an Amazon voucher for a friend whose daughter is dying of cancer.

Obviously I forwarded it to the BT and gov.uk phishing-report services, and also warned our Club Secretary.

The question is, whose address have the rubbish taken over: mine so anything I send goes to them, or the other member?

.

It’s bad enough receiving scam attempts from strange addresses, but is there nothing the cowardly scum will not do?

…

Now, it could be sheer co-incidence but…

…. this is only a few days after my first and will be the only, attempt to use Amazon failed because it wanted me to establish an “account”, but rejected my application because it alleged –wrongly or by lie – that my e-mail address already has an “account” registered to it.

[DiogenesParticipant @diogenes]

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.

[Nicholas FarrParticipant @nicholasfarr14254]

Hi Nigel Graham 2, have you also reported it using the help tag in the green bar. Might be worth getting in touch with Amazon, to find out what’s going on, but make sure you go to their genuine website. You cannot have two Amazon accounts on the same email address, so the one that Amazon says you have, might not have completed correctly, and if you didn’t manage to get a phone number registered, you will not be able to receive anything from the “Forgot my Password”.

I had this problem some time ago when I couldn’t remember my password, and the messages just went to my old phone number that was no longer in use, and I had to give them permission to delete my account and all my history with them, before I could create a new account with the same email address.

Regards Nick.

[Nigel Graham 2Participant @nigelgraham2]

Thank you.

Amazon obstructs any attempt to contact it without an account, but perhaps has not twigged someone might trouble to find the address it refuses to publish, and write to it!

(I found that was the only way to contact Microsoft’s UK office, which is in Reading as I remember.)

However I won’t lose anything by trying the “Forgot Password” route – but I would hope if it does gain access it will allow me to delete the supposed account.

I don’t think I have a telephone number for my friend, only his e-address on a club round-robin. Or I’d ring him to warn him, if he doesn’t already know.

[SandgrounderParticipant @sandgrounder]

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

 

 

[Sandgrounder]

On 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

[Sandgrounder]

On Sandgrounder Said:

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 only seem to get spam on my business email address. I set up filters on the ISP so most of it simply gets diverted to a spam box which I check now and then as the filters aren’t perfect. Oddly a lot of the messages are in Chinese characters, which I don’t read, so they are rather pointless.

I get a few of the “you’ve been watching porn so pay up” messages. Quite laughable really, the last one spent more time telling me how stupid I was and how clever the scammer was, only for them to prove the opposite. Even if I was watching porn the messages are a laugh for several reasons:

1. I wouldn’t be using my business email address.

2. The camera on my computer is only ever plugged in when I have a Zoom session.

3. I couldn’t care less if the alleged pictures were shared – at least it’ll tell you who your real friends are!

Andrew

[SillyOldDufferModerator @sillyoldduffer]

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

 

[Howard LewisParticipant @howardlewis46836]

From time to time an E mail arrives SUPPOEDLY from some one that I know.

But always, the sender’s E maill address is wrong, and often the name is also wrong (Formal name rather than the name by which they are normally known and correspond.

Apart from the E mail address being a give away, the request is for assistance, in the form of money to get home, or an Amazon voucher, that for some reason, they can’t buy.

“Delete”, “Clear trash” usually follow receipt, in quick succession. Eventually the idiots get tirewd of banging btheirm heads on a brick wall, and go searching for some one less sceptical.

My biggest regret is my time that they waste

Howard

[HopperParticipant @hopper]

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.

[Author]

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