I constantly get calls in Mandarin telling me that there is a problem with my Visa.
Haven’t been to China since 2011 though.
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Also, love getting the calls from ■■■■■■■■ scammers calling themselves John Smith or Mary Jones or similar, but who have such a thick Indian accent that even Modi would be need a translator. FOAD painfully to all of them.
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I’ve had a couple of emails from Paypal the last 2 days looking to transfer Bitcoin, one for $USD250 and one for $USD200. Funnily, both try to hit my Visa account rather than my Bank account, and neither have got past the 2-factor authentication.
I would prefer that Paypal took a sterner approach, as in sending electric shocks threough the scammer’s computer.
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My Outlook inbox is getting flooded with scam emails over the last 24 hrs - several an hour. It’s a constant battle to keep it clean and report them as phishing. I’ve never experienced anything like this volume before. Feels like an attack. I assume there is nothing I can do, other than create a new email address & reset everything everywhere, which would be a nightmare. I read recently about someone who experienced something similar directly before their Velocity points were hacked & stolen. Might be worth changing all important passwords …
Singapore is awash with online/phone scams. Because of society norms many believe these calls became it cones from one "of the government departments. "
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I can remember that time when the White House site got corrupted, took us straight to a ■■■■ site, we ended up with ■■■■ on our work computers.
Yeap, the same with my hotmail account. Gmail seems ok.
Heaps of “Microsoft” infection warning emails.
Hopefully the filters will catchup in the next day or 2 with everyone reporting them.
Yep that’s it. My Microsoft account has been suspended for the final time about 20 times today
some major data breach in the last 3 years probably got sold again
Still getting flooded. I’m trying this -
How Can I Block Spam Email with no Sender Email Address? - Microsoft Community
I haven’t got rules, but just work in reverse, have done this for a awhile.
Start with only trusted emails getting through, I then check and move real emails, while adding them to the list.
I then bulk report the spam when I can bothered or just ignore.
Great how M$ always makes things so very much more complicated than it needs to be.
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For those that don’t use gmail already, the automatic spam filtering there is second to none. I’d strongly recommend running a gmail account as your main email account.
If you think it’s too painful to change main email addresses, it’s actually pretty easy:
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Set up a new Gmail address.
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Set all ‘old’ addresses to forward all email to new Gmail address. You can also set up Gmail to ‘pull’ emails from your old email accounts, but almost all email accounts have some way to create a ‘forward all’ rule, and that’s more foolproof, and means emails more quickly arrive at the new address. Pull commands only run every so often, so there can be several minutes delay pulling email.
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Start working all email from the new Gmail address. Ideally through web browser for a PC/Mac or Gmail app on phone, but if you prefer a particular email app, you can use that instead.
This probably takes 15 minutes to an hour to set up, depending on how many email accounts, and what email app you’re using. Once done, all outgoing emails now have your new Gmail address as the reply to address, and a few months or a year later, your old email addresses can be cancelled without much effort or downside.
For those who still have an email address from their ISP, this also stops you being stuck with your ISP, and makes it easy to change NBN providers when it suits.
I have done this for many people, and never had anyone find it difficult, or complain about Gmail.
My work uses Outlook for emails, and MS Office and Excel in particular to produce many of our products, but our domain is set up in Gmail.
I see so many frustrating issues for clients that choose to run MS for email. I’m quite familiar with setting up and running MS domains, servers and email, etc., and like many other MS products, the additional problems provide plenty of opportunity for me to make a living, that I might not have if more people moved away from MS. So I quite like MS from an employment point of view. But as a consumer, and when I advise clients, I avoid it where I can.
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If Gmail filtered out lead gen emails it would be perfect
It is possible to remove yourself from some spam email lists, if you have the time and determination, and enjoy costing spammers money.
You can identify a spammer’s domain provided in their contact link, track down the online host for that domain, and contact them to report the spammer’s account as malicious, with an example of a spam email they’ve sent you. The operators of the online hosts usually shut their domain down pretty quickly.
Then the spammer needs to set up a new domain with a new online host, at their own expense, then upload their website to the new domain. In the meantime, they miss out on any revenue they might have made from people clicking the links in their spam.
As soon as they send you spam again from the new domain, you follow the same procedure again. So they have to keep spending more money and taking more of their time each day or 2.
At that point, if I have a contact email address from their domain details, or in the spam email, I thank them for keeping me on their spam email list, so that I can continue to keep getting their domains cancelled.
They usually remove me from their spam list pretty quickly after that.
I have thought I should run a clinic, teaching more people this process. It’s not difficult, but takes time and persistence from people sick of not being able to strike back.
If we had an army of people getting spammer’s domains shut down, there’d be a lot less of them, and the spam links would be useless to the spammers much of the time, so they’d lose a lot of revenue.
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Great idea!
My main spam problem is not from fraudsters but from companies inviting me to submit my next scientific article to them (of course paying them to do so), or go to their conference etc. Your strategy doesn’t work for them as they are not “malicious”.
There would be about twenty to thirty every day. Setting up rules in MS keeps most out and I must have done this for over 200 “providers” by now. One of them has figured out a way around the MS rules though and is not blocked by MS at all.
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Awesome post
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I’ll detail the process in here when I get some spare time, if it’s going to be of use to anyone.
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The price of being famous Professor Albert.
Interesting reading. interviews with scammers & insight into process & organisation. Evil muthas.
Kinda remind me of the next US administration.
Scams: How social media is used to prey on the sick and vulnerable