We just received an SMS today asking us to claim money for an accident.
After some research it seems as though these have been doing the rounds for a number of years now.
This has since been reported to O2, but our advice is to never interact with these types of unsolicited texts, nor text back STOP as per their request.
1) Verify your account before it's closed.
These are almost NEVER real. If the email contains urgency, asks for personal details, has bad spelling/grammar or is addressed to Dear User or similar, you know it's a scam. Delete these immediately without clicking any links.
2)A large sum of money is due to you.
These are NEVER real. Honestly, why would a person you've never heard of want to give you a vast sum of money? These take the form of an email saying you are the beneficiary of a will, a compensation, or from somebody who needs to transfer some money to your account. Delete these immediately without clicking any links.
3) You've won something!
Surely you're not that gullible, especially if you never entered the completion in the first place?!
These often take the form of news that you've won a lottery or sweepstake and they need you to call a certain number (which will cost you a fortune if you do) or they need your personal details. Delete these immediately without clicking any links.
4) A sudden emergency
There's a lot of these emails doing the rounds recently. They take the form of an email, usually from somebody you know (because your email address has been scraped from your friends infected computer) saying that they are in trouble, have been mugged or have lost all their money and would like you to wire transfer some money to them to help them home. You can spot these are bogus by the very fact that you probably know if your friend is abroad or not, but more importantly by the language the email uses, not tallying with the type of language your friend uses. You can always call your friend and check! Delete these immediately without clicking any links.
5) The Disaster Fund
Whenever there's a major global disaster like an earthquake or famine, scammers will send out emails pretending to be from charities. They will ask you to click a link to make a donation. Don't do it, charities will never cold email random people asking for money. If you're subscribed to a charity's mailing list, then they might send you information, but these emails will always address you by name, and you'll know that you support that charity. Be suspicious, always.
6) The Chain Email - 'If you don't send this on to your friends something bad will happen'
Any email that asks you to forward it to a number of others is always bogus. Even if it pretends to alert you to some terrible scam.
These often take the form of free services or products from major vendors, free discount vouchers, free phones etc., or are medical appeals for sick children, petitions or news of an impending computer virus. Don't EVER forward these emails. Firstly go to Snopes.com and search for the email you've received. You'll almost always find it here. Secondly, delete the email without interacting with it.
We hope this page has been useful. If so, please please let your friends and family know (but not by mass email asking them to forward to all their friends!)
Even with all the publicity around spam, around half of all email recipients are still responding in some form to socially engineered mail messages, according to a survey released this week by the nonprofit Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group.
A response was counted as opening the spam, clicking on a link within it or opening an attachment within the spam.
This is a worrying statistic. If you come to this site, hopefully you'll know not to even open the message in the first place, let alone, heaven forbid, opening an attachment, which will almost certainly lead to your machine contracting a virus, trojan or other exploit.
Apparently half of those who responded, did so on purpose, meaning that there is still a market for enhancing male genitalia.
This is too good not to share. Have a read of this beauty:
------------------------------------------------------------------
From The Desk of Reverend James Michael,
Director Inter-Switch Unit.
Direct Tel: +2347092623554.
Attention
Based on our investigation of your payment, we want to find out if you're still alive or did you assign any (Grace Jackson) to receive your fund, reply to us with:
Your Full Names:
Your Home Address
Your Cell Phone
Your Occupation:
Your Age/Sex:
This is because US$7.1 Million has been approved, so provide the above information unfailingly today or your fund will be released to Mrs. Grace
Jackson.
Regards,
Reverend James Michael,
Direct Tel: +2347092623554
Chairman, Investigation and Debt Settlement Committee
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Please do NOT ring the above number. This is a real scam.
We received this today, and I thought it would be worth posting online for all to see.
I'm sure we've all had them, but it's hard to imagine that anybody could ever be taken in by this.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hello Dearest,
I know this might come to you as a surprise, but please do accept it in good faith and treat as a matter of urgency with utmost confidentiality.
I am Miss Ariana Hani from Khartoum-Sudan; Northeastern Africa, now seeking political asylum in Dakar Senegal under the UNHCR as a refugee.
I am searching for a true friend, kind and honest to stand as my foreign representative to help me receive my inheritance funds so I can leave this camp and come to your country to continue my education.
Please kindly reply if you know in your heart you would want to help me. Remain Bless.
Ariana
*kisses**
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In a recent victory for the net user, a US Federal Court judge ordered the takedown of nearly 300 domains this week.
These domains were being used to control malware infected computers, under the Waledac botnet which accounted for more than 650 million spam emails a month.
Microsoft filed the lawsuit after the botnet, which appeared toward the end of 2008, infected hundreds of thousands of computers, and sent millions of spam emails to Hotmail accounts.
The judges action now allows researchers the opportunity to cloesly study the botnet activity at the domain level.
Effectively all communication from the botnet has been terminated.
In an article from SC Magazine, the sheer scale of spam was reported:
"At its peak, the impact of Waledac was stunning. Microsoft found that between Dec. 3 and 21, more than 650 million spam messages directed to Hotmail accounts were attributable to the botnet.
And researchers at security firm ESET reported last summer that PCs infected with Waledac were capable of sending 6,548 spam emails per hour, or two emails per second. The company found that if, for example, 20,000 computers were infected with Waledac, then the botnet was capable of sending three billion emails per day, if all infected computers were working to full capacity."
With figures like that, most users should see a reduction in the amount of spam hitting their inboxes.
Lets hope that after years of misery and inaction, finally the tide will turn against the spam community.
