Spotting a phishing scam

I recently received an email, which looked like it was from PayPal, but I instantly could see it was a phishing scam, however they do seem to be getting better at mimicking. Below is the image of the email, the number of errors that highlight it is a phishing scam is in double figures, how many can you spot? I do not want to point them all out, that would be helping the criminals.

I will point out an obvious one, which I imagine they would find hard to correct, that is at the top it says 'Dear Client', this is not specific enough to be genuine email from a company that knows more details about you than just your email address. Some phishing emails would replace 'Client' and put the word of your email address before the '@' symbol e.g. Dear Smith_John, this would also highlight a phishing scam.

My general advice on receiving emails is:

1. Read the email, do not just click on the link, even if it looks urgent, that is what the scammers are counting on.
2. If you have no instigated an email e.g. requested a password reset, then it is best to assume it is a scam.
3. Do NOT use any links provided in the email, instead go to the companies web site through a link of your own (bookmark) or from a search engine. The web site address should have a HTTPS prefix, not just a HTTP.  
4. If the offer sounds to good to be true, then it is a scam.
5. If there is just one thing that does not look right e.g. spelling mistake, poor grammar or poor quality logo then it is a phishing scam.

Beware 0203 2907142 Microsoft Phone Scam

I had a phone call today from someone claiming to be from Microsoft, the phone display the number as 'unknown', which was a bit suspicious. The person did not speak very good english and said something about the phone call was about hackers of your Windows operating system. I explained that we did not use Windows, which he did not understand at first. I asked him for his telephone number and he said it was 0203 2907142.

I told him again that we did not use Windows, then he decided to hangup.

This was clearly some sort of scam to try to get me to go onto my Windows PC and then the caller would have most likely have gained access and then I would have been in real trouble.

Be careful, do not give any information to anyone claiming to be from a company that would like access to your PC.

Hopefully countries and governments will get together and seriously punish these criminals, not sure where the money goes to from these scumbag scammers, but it would not surprise me if it did not end up in serious criminals and terrorist bank accounts.

Email scam from Broad Oak toiletries

I received an email a few days ago regarding an invoice from Broad Oak Toiletries. The email was very plain, but looked like a normal email. The email was from a person called Sue Mockridge and included an attached. At first I thought the person had just sent it to the wrong person and I considered forwarding it on to our accounts department, then I briefly thought about opening the invoice, but thank God I did not. After looking on the net I found out it was a malicious scam and deleted the email.

My advice to anyone is that if you receive an email you are not expecting with an attachment do not open it, that must be rule one. Best thing to do is use Google and check if anyone else has reported it, if not still do not open it, do a bit of research into the company it came from and even contact the company before opening it.

Death of social networking?

Lately I have found that there are more and more issues with social networking sites.Here is a list of current issues and possible future problems that I have heard of.

• There are more and more scams appearing on the sites, the latest I saw was the Facebook Tesco scam which looked like a valid offer because a friend had put a link for it. I can see that there will be more elaborate scams in the future.
• You have to be very careful on who is your friend, there a lot of fake accounts with people who say they know you just to get more information on you.
• Insurance companies are looking at social networking and what information you put on them, like if you say you are going out and you get burgled they will not payout.
• A lot of people are getting a bit tired of it and it is no longer innovative and needs something new. Once everyone was using friends reunited, but these things are fads and become less and less popular.

There are of course reasons why social networking is here to stay, but people get bored and there has to be constant innovation to keep people interested, without this people will move onto other sites and trends. Is it possible that in a few years time people will have had enough of social networking and will be interested in something else. I can see some sites like Linked In continuing because it is a place to advertise your work, it could be Facebook and Twitter also go down this avenue and include a way recruitment agencies can use their sites. I think the next couple of years will be an interesting time, with existing sites looking for innovation and new sites and new ideas appearing.