Another Scam?

Today I received what I believe to be a very elaborate scam email which appears to rely on me being forgetful. Supposedly from "Southern Fed Website Automation."

It thanks me for my application for an account for the SFEDWA, which I have definitely not done and never heard of this so called Website Automation and further says my account has been created and invites me to press a link button to confirm my email address is correct and reset my password.

Oh yeah? Pity we can't have an eyeball or the sender would notice that I do not have a tattoo on my forehead: MUG !

Deleted, of course. Scammer needs to get up a bit earlier to catch me out - not that easy to do.

Edited By DMB on 10/12/2018 19:57:20

best just check that when you phoned them it was not a premium rate number at £20/min or such like.

It has transpired that "Southern Federation Website Automation" message received by me, is their normal way of contacting clubs, of which I was unaware at the time.

I therefore retract my previous post about a possible scam and apologise to Dr Baker at SFED for any confusion and inconvenience caused.

Will readers of this post please note that them emails sent out by "SFED Website Automation" are OK and genuine. Many apologies for any confusion.

It has transpired that "Southern Federation Website Automation" message received by me, is their normal way of contacting clubs, of which I was unaware at the time.

I therefore retract my previous post about a possible scam and apologise to Dr Baker at SFED for any confusion and inconvenience caused.

Will readers of this post please note that them emails sent out by "SFED Website Automation" are OK and genuine. Many apologies for any confusion.

Puzzled me too. Perhaps obvious to those in model engineering club circles 'down south' but took a bit of finding for me - anyway I'm guessing it was the "Southern Federation of Model Engineering Societies" who sent the email...

https://www.sfmes.co.uk/public/

(and clicking on the 'need any help' item in the menu brings up details for Dr Baker)

Edited By Bikepete on 15/12/2018 16:13:54

And that link above takes me to a page tells me that I am using an unsupported browser & after some bullet-pointed spiel to please obtain another browser and try again.

But, actually I was using Internet Explorer version 11 (the last and fully supported) with all current updates. So, a fully up to date browser! Not good.

Regards,

Phil

Weary, I'm on Firefox and it works fine for me.

Mick, could you maybe explain your schizophrenia comment? I honestly have no idea what you're referring to, but if it's a comment on the perhaps rather basic web page design I feel it's unkind, especially considering that all involved are presumably volunteers.

IE11 is 'Discontinued and Maintained' rather than 'Fully Supported'. Microsoft would much prefer you to use Edge and Windows 10. Many website owners would prefer you to avoid Internet Explorer too. It has a number of non-standard features that annoy web publishers. In consequence IE ihas become a minority product, this graph from Wikipedia.  Not very clear but IE is the blue line dropping from 65% in 2009.

Several better alternatives available - I use Firefox.

Dave

Edited By SillyOldDuffer on 15/12/2018 17:58:30

I am one who agrees that there is no excuse for putting out an 'unsupported browser' message. There is nothing you can't do adequately with even much older versions of IE than version 11. The problem is geeks and kids who want to do something fancy with some new feature or are using some website builder tool that was created by one of these geeks.
The southern fed should be aware that their target market is likely to use an older version of IE and not be into using minority browsers, they should have tested against IE and made the effort to support it.

Back to the original problem too there is no excuse for sending out emails that at least in the first line of the message clearly explain who they are. This is the sort of sloppy performance I pull up our trainees on, before they get near to sending out internal inter-departmental communications let alone to customers.

Chrome is easily the most used by a big margin, something like a half of all people using Chrome. The next nearest with about a third the usage of Chrome is Safari. Internet explorer is is only used by about 3% now.

When you sign up to this forum, the system sends you an email to confirm.

Guess what, when you sign up to the Southern Federation website, the system there also sends you an email to confirm.

Now as is the case in this forum, anyone can put anybody else's email address in the registration form. The process of using the email prevents that rouge person getting any further as well as confirming that a genuine registration did not have any typo in the address.

So now enter the Management of Brighton and Hove Society who combine inability to talk with each other and as Mike Charity says earlier in this thread "This is as classical an example of schizophrenia as you could ever wish to find . . ."

All that has happened is that the retiring Treasurer had the new Treasurer's details submitted to the SFMES records and the new Treasurer chose to go public rather than check with his colleagues when the system did its due diligence of telling him.

The Chairman of Brighton and Hove took the trouble to telephone me and apologies profusely about all this.

Its time this thread now got put to bed.

----------------

Maybe you should be more concerned about the probity of this forum. Here am I entering data on this thread - but I did not get any confirmation email and so I have never proven that I am who I am. It is letting me enter comments without any diligence in verifying who I am?

Extortionate demand received from bbb726b7.virtua.com.br ([187.183.38.183]) who thinks he is untraceable because he put my email as the return address...

Hello!

As you may have noticed, I sent you an email from your account.
This means that I have full access to your account.

I've been watching you for a few months now.
The fact is that you were infected with malware through an adult site that you visited.

If you are not familiar with this, I will explain.
Trojan Virus gives me full access and control over a computer or other device.
This means that I can see everything on your screen, turn on the camera and microphone, but you do not know about it.

I also have access to all your contacts and all your correspondence.

Why your antivirus did not detect malware?
Answer: My malware uses the driver, I update its signatures every 4 hours so that your antivirus is silent.

I made a video showing how you satisfy yourself in the left half of the screen, and in the right half you see the video that you watched.
With one click of the mouse, I can send this video to all your emails and contacts on social networks. I can also post access to all your e-mail correspondence and messengers that you use.

If you want to prevent this, transfer the amount of $748 to my bitcoin address (if you do not know how to do this, write to Google: “Buy Bitcoin&#8221.

My bitcoin address (BTC Wallet) is: 18QtUZKEsuY9gvviSsZCweyPRLSDndU6Xu

After receiving the payment, I will delete the video and you will never hear me again.
I give you 48 hours to pay.
I have a notice reading this letter, and the timer will work when you see this letter.

Filing a complaint somewhere does not make sense because this email cannot be tracked like my bitcoin address.
I do not make any mistakes.

If I find that you have shared this message with someone else, the video will be immediately distributed.

Best wishes!

I had a several weeks, some months ago, of getting several a day of similar emails, albeit a lot shorter and asking for different amounts of Bitcoin. Totally laughable for several reasons:

If I was looking at naughty websites I wouldn't be using my business email as the login

I couldn't care less if the supposed video was shared

Oh, and my computer is so old it doesn't have a camera!

Andrew

No we know your account has not been verified in the case that you start playing up

But also your post had to be approved by a moderator before it appeared.

Neil