Scams

[patrish]

I must admit that I don't have much trouble, I am very careful about what sites I go into.   I have a cousin who constantly surfs the net and he changes his e.mail address every five minutes because of all the rubbish he gets.

[ger_g]

I agree patrish - the delete button is my best friend   Glad you had some joy ozlady... hopefully your bank was able to nab them. Even one less of these dodgy folk spamming our inboxes is a blessing

Cheers
Ger

[BevL]

When you open your email for the first time now, there are several from the same person one after the other and sometimes when you have finished loading, not one of those or the others was for you.
The way they are bombarding people these days, you would really have to be very dumb to reply and give your details to them anyway, though sometimes they are not even to my address, but similar.

[Tony Payne]

Most of those messages did not originate from the person or address it says it came from - the addresses have been hijacked or just faked.  Many of the faked messages come from China these days, or other palces where it's hard to control the internet.

The worst thing you can do is to reply to them - best to just delete them.  A lot of the time the email addresses they are sending to are program generated - they are just hoping to get a 'hit'.  By replying all you do is to confirm to them that your email address is valid - that opens you up for more junk.

No easy solution really, other than making sure you have a good firewall program, if you have a wireless network in the house make sure it's secured, make sure you have an active anti-virus program (and there are many new virus variants released every day), and if you use a mail program like Outlook Express or Thunderbird (better) set your junk filtering to auto delete at least some of them.

[downside]

I received this email yesterday and I'm trying to work out whether it is genuine or not:

Since I have not been in contact with this company I'm wondering why I am a recipient of the email.

downside

[ger_g]

Maybe as Tony says it's simply a bulk email sent out to random addresses to see who bites... I think I would delete that one straight out Another tip would be to put the details of the message into google e.g. "surveillance officer email Terry Smith" and see if there's any chat about it on the boards sites. Often these scams are talked about and you can get an idea by looking at what's being said. Having said that, a lot of the boards sites do have pop-ups etc so I would avoid entering your email anywhere - I just browse.

Cheers
Ger

[patrish]

I would delete is also Downside, unless you really want to become a Private Eye

[Tony Payne]

It's either a solicitation to get you involved in a scam, or just an attempt to verify your email address.

The dead giveaway is that if it's a company, or even a 1-person company, then they will have their own website at least.   This email came from btinternet.com (well that could also have been faked)... Any solicitation that comes from AOL, Yahoo, MSN, Hotmail, Gmail or any of the other email providers, or ISP's like Tiscali, Bellsouth, Comcast to name a few more is sent from a personal email address and not a company address.  No serious company would approach you without using their official email address.


Again, best bet with this one is to delete it.  Replying just comfirms to them that your email address is valid.  No doubt the email was sent to a number of recipients - you can tell by looking at the email header (how to do this depends on the program that you use to read your email).

[Necromancer]

Downside - any clues in the Email Headers that its 'mocked up' ?

If you never post your email address on a board or other public places, then they have sourced it somewhere else - maybe someones address book on a PC that has contracted a virus ?

I use 'Mailwasher' to pre-view my Inbox and blacklist/delete obvious junk - then Outlook only pulls down what's legit ..... sort of ...