Scams used to rely on greed .....

[Box Brownie]

.....now there is one relying on fear!

Somewhere hereabouts, though cannot find it again, is a thread asking how someone can spoof your own email addy to send you a threatening email re: exposing your supposed web browsing of p**n sites et al.

Swmbo showed me that she had received the same one I recalled seeing mentioned at TP.

In the past phishing emails promising you millions of pounds/dollars were commonplace. But now it/they are tantamount to blackmail

Clearly they are harvesting email addresses somewhere/somehow and scattergunning very large numbers of folk ~ grr!

I told her to simply delete it of her iPad and also when she sees off of her laptop.

 

[Tori_T]

Oh, those emails.
I see a lot of them; email header spoofing is an old trick.
If you examine the IP addresses, you'll see it actually came from somewhere else in the world; I've seen the exact same email from widely disparate sources, indicating it's a botnet sending them out.

Unfortunately, there's quite a few not-too-bright folks out there who do a lot of porn surfing, and I suspect enough of those a falling for this to make it profitable.

 

[Harriers9]

It's the one's that give your password in the email that mystify me too. I changed the one they mentioned on as many sites i could remember and then a few weeks later get another crop with my new password.

I have Malwarebytes Professional and it detects nothing at all. Worrying.

Thankfully I don't use a regular password for banking and other such sites but it's surprising that they don't get those too.

 

[Tori_T]

There's a chance they've compromised one of the sites the password was used on, and there's nothing actually on your system to find.

 

[onomatopoeia]

It's the one's that give your password in the email that mystify me too. I changed the one they mentioned on as many sites i could remember and then a few weeks later get another crop with my new password.

I have Malwarebytes Professional and it detects nothing at all. Worrying.

It's not your machine that has been compromised, it's a website you have an account with that stores the password in plain or with a trivial salt and has been compromised.

 

[ancient_mariner]

I've had a couple of those emails recently. The first was almost pathetically funny, because they forgot to include an address to send payment to.

 

[Harriers9]

The funny thing is that they say they have access to my web camera and have seen me watching 'those' sites and how much I 'enjoyed' them.

I don't have a web cam on my desktop set up

 

[ancient_mariner]

The funny thing is that they say they have access to my web camera and have seen me watching 'those' sites and how much I 'enjoyed' them.

I don't have a web cam on my desktop set up

And my laptop is used in clamshell with external monitor except when I'm in the office. I guess it makes a change from someone offering 10% of $Xmillion, but the down side is that some poor fool will probably top themselves over it.

 

[Nawty]

It's the one's that give your password in the email that mystify me too. I changed the one they mentioned on as many sites i could remember and then a few weeks later get another crop with my new password.

I have Malwarebytes Professional and it detects nothing at all. Worrying.

Thankfully I don't use a regular password for banking and other such sites but it's surprising that they don't get those too.

Are you using the same password across many accounts? Not really advisable...

 

[Harriers9]

I use the same password (or slight variants) on football sites. It would be impossible to have a different password for every one of them. Runs into hundreds.

 

[Brendan Mulachy]

ive had some of them...i replied...go ahead and fill your boots son

 

[Tringa]

Haven't seen this one for a while but a few years ago I have a message, allegedly form the Metropolitan Police.

It said they had detected my PC was being used to access and download child pornography and terrorism related material and that my machine would be blocked and I would not be to use it.

It also said that if I clicked on a link and paid them my PC would not be blocked.

I wonder how the people trying these scams think. Do they believe anyone is going to be taken in by such scam? As if the Met are going to find child pornography and terrorism related stuff on your PC, tell you they have found it and then say, "If you give us a few quid we'll let you off"


Dave

 

[Phil V]

What bothers me most.
I had a phone call last week, clearly a scam, followed by switching on the telly to see a stream of clearly vulnerable old folks who’d been the victim of such con artists.
Their victim status clearly underlined by the fact that they were conned by people who used ‘very plausible’ stories (that most of us would find ridiculous). I do genuinely feel sorry for these ‘victims’ however...
later that week, all these same old folk are on question time lecturing us all that we young folk don’t have their ‘experience of how the world works’.

What’s the worst con that these poor old buggers might have been susceptible to? Could they have been conned into screwing the country for decades to come?

 

[landwomble]

It's the one's that give your password in the email that mystify me too. I changed the one they mentioned on as many sites i could remember and then a few weeks later get another crop with my new password.

I have Malwarebytes Professional and it detects nothing at all. Worrying.

Thankfully I don't use a regular password for banking and other such sites but it's surprising that they don't get those too.

They're not hacking you, they're getting userne and password combos from compromised websites and you've used the same password on more than one.

Psychologically, it's clever. Seeing a reused real password makes it seems very real

Don't reuse passwords, and check haveibeenpwned.com to get an idea of where your password has been compromised.

 

[Harriers9]

They're not hacking you, they're getting userne and password combos from compromised websites and you've used the same password on more than one.

Psychologically, it's clever. Seeing a reused real password makes it seems very real

Don't reuse passwords, and check haveibeenpwned.com to get an idea of where your password has been compromised.

For my main email account I found Last.FM but I changed that one when the hack was first made public. The other two - Quin Street and Onliner Spambot I have never heard of.

My secondary account has six. ADOBE and LinkedIn (both were changed first time round) and BITLY. Haven't used that for years but I'll change it now. The others - Onliner Spambot again, Anti Public Combo List and Exploit.In. I presume I can do nothing about those.

 

[keef32]

When i worked for Santander an old woman called up to ask if she'd been scammed...

Basically 2 men had turned up at her house and said they worked for her bank and were there to renew her bankcard. All she had to do was had over her bank card and for confirmation give them her pin number and they would be back from the van shortly after printing her new card...
Took her an hour to call up to ask if this was real or not...

Luckily they'd only tried an online purchase in that time so she more than likely got the money back, but WOW

 

[Box Brownie]

When i worked for Santander an old woman called up to ask if she'd been scammed...

Basically 2 men had turned up at her house and said they worked for her bank and were there to renew her bankcard. All she had to do was had over her bank card and for confirmation give them her pin number and they would be back from the van shortly after printing her new card...
Took her an hour to call up to ask if this was real or not...

Luckily they'd only tried an online purchase in that time so she more than likely got the money back, but WOW

Grrr! this one really does fall into the category of taking advantage of the (frail?) elderly..........hanging, drawing & quartering should be the punishment for such cruel treatment of those that cannot always defend themselves.

PS when I was fundraising and the process involved taking bank details I had an older lady sign-up, I had recorded all the basic details to setup the Direct Debit but she then said.......oh, you will my PIN won't you....further saying "here it is written here.......". I was aghast that she thought it was needed.

It struck me quickly that she had been in situations of payment where folk had asked for it . I took as my duty of care to talk her quietly through the fact that no one not even her bank should ever ask for the PIN ......and that should it happen to refuse and walk away even if she thinks she might be seen as rude to do so.