Possible New Internet Scam to be Aware of.

Today I received a very convincing email from TVLicensing stating that they are unable to renew my TV Licence automatically because my direct debit had failed and that I needed to make an online payment to them as failure to do so could incur cancellation of my TV licence and passing my details to a debt collection agency. Fortunately I have access to my banking online and was able to check that no direct debits had failed and the amount that they quoted as the payment needed wasnt even the correct amount of my direct debit. I would warn anyone who receives such an email check it out and take care if you log on to any of the log ins provided in the email, it could cost you a lot of money.

Dave W

Yep, get these all the time! Strangely though they seem to arrive just after the date I pay......everyone seems to be watching everyone. I'm going the VPN route.

Always hover the curser over the name and you'll see the senders email address. It's usually random letters or numbers after the @. Mark as phishing and then double delete.

I've had this e-mail several times. Seeing that I've had a free TV license for the past ten years and the fact that i haven't had a TV for at least fifty years , I simply ignored it

Roy

One 'trick' that I found out by accident is to send the email to a made up (incorrect) email address.

The return I had stating email could not be sent actually showed the senders correct email address. Barclaycard were most pleased that I typed their email address incorrectly when I was sending them the fraud email. I believe that this fraudster was subsequently traced.

What an excellent idea, many thanks.

Brian

There is also a new scam going round where you are advised that you qualify for a refund of some £279 on your TV licence but that the BBC require your bank details in order to make the payment.

Mike

Fake emails are sent to random addresses in large numbers in hope of catching someone off-guard.

Most scams fail at the first hurdle because the emails don't match your circumstances at the time. The jump out as dodgy. Even so large sums of money are going west: BT's Website suggests about £11bn in the UK in 2016.

People get caught when by chance a fraudulent email just happens to line up with reality. If already expecting a legitimate call from the Inland Revenue, BT, your Pharmacy, Gas Company, the police or whatever, there's a good chance even a wide-awake security expect might fall for a fake.

A more dangerous possibility is leaked personal information being added to emails containing realistic stuff in the public domain like your Bank's address and telephone number. I've had one or two that were uncomfortably close to the real thing at first glance.

Don't believe any emails asking for bank account details or access to your computer. Double check everything, especially when it's expected!

Dave

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[BT being my service provider] The most irritating aspect of that is: Most of the fraudulent eMails I receive purport to come from BT and actually come from genuine @btinternet.com addresses belonging to innocent BT customers.

It would have been nice to think they could trap a few more of these, rather than just deliver them to my Inbox.

MichaelG.

Some of these "clever" fraudsters slip up on silly details, thankfully.

This week a message arrived, supposedly from a friend, except that his name was misspelled, and the sender's E mail address was visible!

Total amateur., who has hacked into someone's address book, but too deficient in English to realise the need to spell a Scottish, or Irish surname correctly, or that the supposed originator is not a resident of Germany, like them!

Obviously trawling for the unobservant gullible

Howard

I use a program called Mailwasher which allows you to preview all your emails on the server and eaily delete the unwanted ones - it also learns and automatically marks spam emails. Been using the free version for many years now, works fine for me, although the latest free versions only allow you to use one email address.

Edited By Rob Rimmer on 21/06/2019 23:26:59

The BT Internet service seems to go some way to what Mailwasher does.

I have received a couple of those "stuck in Paris" messages allegedly from genuine people such as fellow club-members, but whilst the criminals might be able to copy the compromised sender's visible address, they can't avoid using their own background source address.

I don't know if other services offer it but BT's e-post page' 'Actions' menu allows you to 'View Source', and whilst most is just unreadable code, the source and any devious routes are visible; as also sometimes are the originating country codes.

I have used this to verify a very convincing message from a friend was false - I compared it with his real address.

An oddity with my computer is that it won't allow e-messages via addresses embedded in web-sites. I have to copy them to the normal e-post function. I don't know if it's an effect of my security software, or if it enhances security.

Saw a doco on TV where almost illiterate street kids in Lagos, Nigeria, buy time at shanty town internet "cafes" and send out such scam emails. Poor buggers are desperate for a feed yet only one mouse click away from people who live a fabulous life of luxury by comparison. IE, us. You have to feel sorry for them when you see their circumstances. Most of us, if we met them in person, would not begrudge them a few bucks to feed them for a week or two. Truly sad.

In today's related news: **LINK**

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-48719098

MichaelG.

I cop this every time i buy something off Ebay and the best one was some one supposedly from England that had won lotto and was giving away money- just supply your bank details and we will deposit the money today !

I also get the old your account has been locked for my apple account a few days after i download an app and of course there is a link to unlock it - do these dickheads think i am that stupid !

I often wonder where our £7 billion per year foreign aid goes to, obviously does bugger all for the really desperate? Sorry to get political but it makes me so mad!

Tony

Captain Obvious on the line here. As all these E-Mail scams depend on contents that don't match the actual reply address how hard could it be to filter them out automatically at the server. In a world where search engines seem to know pretty much everything short of, maybe, what I had for breakfast yesterday, I'd say pretty darn easy. Don't even need to scan the contents. A real source / reply address concealed by an apparently correct one should be sufficient red flag. Thats just one of the many things in the huge lump of invisible data that comes with every E-Mail. Most of the time the rubbish you don't see is far bigger than the content you do see.

Captain Cynical says its down to the folk running the various companies and their so called security experts being unwilling to actually do their job.

Electronic bank payment interception and outright scams are another thing that could be stopped in nothing flat by competent systems.

Don't get me started on the ransomeware thing. Unscrambling data on a disk whose contents are mostly known is almost trivial.

Clive

I must be missing some vital security knowledge regarding banking transactions. Even if a scammer obtains someones bank account details how do they persuade the bank to send them money from that account. I can understand an account owner transferring money because he has been persuaded to do so but not how a bank might transfer money to a "new" recipient without the account owners permission. Not everyone who has a bank account necessarily has on-line banking enabled so maybe this isn't their way in.

Clive

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Exactly my point regarding btinternet

MichaelG.

Guess who WILL NOT use On Line banking, and why?

Sadly, if you live anywhere in UK that is not a big town or city, you now have a thirty mile round trip to get to an actual Bank branch containing real human beings, (unless you get the occasional mobile bank that a few provide )

It is difficult to hack into pen and ink, unless you are a good forger!

Howard

Good question! Perhaps for obvious reasons they don't want us to know. It's certainly possible. Read about Jeremy Clarkson when he printed his Sort Code and Account number in the Sun to prove it wasn't enough information for anyone to get money from his account. What could possibly go wrong?

There are bad guys who understand computer security and financial systems far better than we do. You have to trust that the bank's experts are one step in front of the criminals, or - when it goes wrong - that the bank pays, not the customer.

All banking is electronic, whether individual customers choose to be online or not. Going online increases the risk, but it's not the only way in.

Dave