OneGuyFromBarlick

Talktalk must have an efficient filter, I never see these now, or penis extensions either!

I see them often as spam messages Stanley. I don't need one of those extensions - te he he he

I got an email yesterday from a trusted source. It had a link attached to a PDF supposedly containing news of Johnston Press, the publishers of the BET. I didn't like the look of it and have Firefox set so that it never redirects to another page. I considered opening it but decided to have a think. I went digging this morning and discovered that the site it was redirecting to, AlbayanOils, is a dangerous forgery and on no account should anyone log on to it. Looks like one of the 'take over your PC' scams. I have warned the actual sender that he has obviously been hacked.

There is a high likelihood that the "sender" didn't ,send it. In my experience most of these kind of things are spam runs where the spammer has used one of the addresses in his database as a return address. The "sender's" computer doesn't enter into the equation. Email is the world's easiest thing to forge.

I'm a great fan of gmail, these days, I have it collecting email from 5 different providers and it very effectively filters it. The self emptying spam box gets 10 times as much stuff as my inbox. It very rarely gets it wrong. And because its web based, my email is where I want it to be, not on my main computer.

I realise that Pluggy, the main thing is to be aware of the dangers of that site. Very similar to the attack I nearly allowed with the bogus Talktalk phone call..... It's a dangerous world out there!

Had another of the Amazon spam emails yesterday purporting to say I had ordered goods from them. No action, just delted it because the last time I forwarded one to Amazon anti-spam address it bounced.....

Yesterday we were targeted with an email headed `Message from local network scanner' with a Reply To address of jpaoscanner@xxxxxx where xxxxx is our domain name. It had a file attached with a .doc extension. I did a search on the web and found it was described in January 2016 as: `An empty or blank email with the subject of Message from local network scanner pretending to come from jpaoscanner at your own email domain with a malicious word doc attachment. It is another one from the current bot runs which try to download various Trojans and password stealers especially banking Trojans like Dridex or Dyreza and ransomware like cryptolocker or Teslacrypt." LINK It's specific to Windows PCs but it got zapped anyway!

Mrs Tiz's neice has had her old email address cloned and we're receiving messages from that address sent to our correct email address and with Mrs Tiz's correct first name. Each message begins with `Salutations' followed by Mrs Tiz's first name, then a web link, and ending with the niece's first name. The web addresses are part genuine, part gobbledegook.

Every so often I get e-mails which look as though they are from people I know, usually cousins, with the opening word "Hi" followed by a URL link address. Straight into the bin. Its amazing how many people forward e-mails without deleting the previous sender. No wonder the scammers can get hold of loads of addresses.

Many people don't know the difference between CC and BCC and send out emails on CC with dozens of addresses visible. Even people in companies sometimes haven't been trained to use BCC or they don't carefully before pressing Send.

I got one yesterday purporting to be from 'Visa/Mastercard'. As if! Guess what I did with it.....

I had one from the Post Office to tell me that the package they were due to deliver had been seized by HM Customs and Excise as counterfeit goods and there was a link for me to click to claim compensation, right........

Nowt ordered and nowt expected I'll put up with the loss.

I had a genuine apology in my HSBC account messages because of an outage to their system sometime earlier. The letter writer's name? Hackett.

Not spam but we just had an outage in the internet connection. But Barlick is now receiving you loud and clear China.....

Talktalk were probably doing some updates in what (for most people at anyrate) is the middle of the night.

Start of the day for me Plugs..... It's the early worm that gets eaten by the bird.... Old habits die hard and it seems to suit me.

Companies and other organisations make it increasingly hard for the public to spot scam emails because they send out a flood of their own marketing messages, some with silly titles so that it's difficult to tell them from spam emails. I'm sorry to say that Nationwide tend to do this now. M&S are awful, if we buy something from them online we get one or more emails a day. You can unsubscribe but it starts all over again the next time you make a purchase.

I hate it when you log onto something like British Gas or Talk Talk and before they do what you want, they clutter your life up with sales offers. That in itself is spam!

Don't get caught out by a malicious scam email about parking tickets that's doing the rounds. We got it today and and I checked on the Web. It only needs someone to click on the link in the scam email and they'll get an unwanted nasty download. The details about it are on the police Action Fraud site on this link:
Action Fraud

There is a speeding fine scam doing the rounds as well supposedly from Manchester Police. I got one the other day but I had just read a warning on Facebook. It did mention speeding in a 35mph zone, which was a bit of a giveaway!

They are trying to catch the Xmas Spirit, people distracted by tinsel.....

If you have dealings with Nationwide building society beware of emails currently going around titled `Nationwide Secure Email - Secured Message' and an attached file named secure.doc. We've just had one but I looked up the title on Google and found a 3rd August 2017 warning about it: LINK

Beware of emails titled `New BT Online Bill' and claiming to be from BT Business. They're scams. We've both just received one each. The links are not to BT but to a strange unknown domain which you can see if you hover your mouse cursor over the highlighted hypertext link - but don't click on it!

I've had that one and also good news from HMRC of a tax refund. I didn't even open either of them...

Obvious phishing expedition purporting to be from Amazon about my account. Zapped of course without opening.

We.re getting more at the moment. The scammers boost their output when they know people are put out of normal routine and less on guard as now with the bad weather.