Damned e-mail scams

[Pedro]

In the past 3 weeks I have received three bogus e-mails.

The first was on a perfect copy of a Virgin e-mail addressed from Virgin.com.au telling me to check the attached itinerary. As I was flying in the following week I opened the attachment without thinking and AVG grabbed three trojans.

Last week I got one on a perfect copy of Qantas addressed from flightinfo@yourbooking.qantas.com.au that was supposedly a receipt for purchasing seat allocation. This didn't have an attachment. It just dropped a key logger in as soon as it arrived. Once again AVG grabbed the virus.

And today I got one from "the ATO" advising me of a tax rebate that could be accessed in an attachment. Needless to say I deleted it.

Are these rotten mongrels going to eventually make everyone so ****ed off that e-mails will become a thing of the past?

[TC200six]

I know that users of Bigpond email accounts have had similar scams where users receive fraudulent emails claiming to be from Bigpond that ask for a username and password.

The messages are something like: "We are currently upgrading our data base and e-mail center for this year. We are deleting all unused accounts to create more space to create new ones and to stop spam mails. To prevent your account from closing, fill out below", etc.

[2011G6E]

They're becoming very very good at this...I've recieved ones from Qantas, Virgin, ANZ, and a few other companies. The airline ones I knew immediately were a scam as we haven't been on any flying holidays...ever. When you open the links at the bottom, they take you to the genuine website, which makes them look legit. It's replying directly to the email with payment details that is the way they hope to get some money out of you.

[Auslandau]

I would receive 10 a day from every bank, aircraft, ATO, Telstra etc. Never seen so many and am trying through our email bloke to try and put some blocks up. The amount of bogus invoices is amazing as well. Its really gone berserk!

[Pepscobra]

Makes me wonder how many scam emails I've opened thinking they were the real thing...?

[xtremerus]

New Telsta one the other day said it attached my bill as trial paperless billing.
Said it was a pdf file.
But attachment was a zip file, and account No. made up.
DELETE

The wife received the same email the next day as well, different account No.
She doesn't have a Telsra account.
DELETE

[Yellow_Festiva]

The host for my online business did some updates to their server that required my web programer to make some adjustments in the script to allow the new security measures to work with my site.

Since that happened, I would get 10-15 scam emails a day sent from the 'contact us' page on my site. So, I had no way of blocking emails sent.. well from myself!

Would have deleated a hundred or so... it has finally died down now to one or two a day.

One of the radio comentators on 2GB had a novel idea to stop the scam emailers... simply put a charge of a few cents per email sent. Wouldn't really hurt the people sending 'real' email... but the ones that pump out tens of thousands a day from various databases?????

[Darren351]

they have started via the phone now aswell. sick of getting sms's saying that ive won the lottery , or a great uncle has died leaving me millions of dollars.

[GhiaEB]

Originally Posted by Yellow_Festiva

One of the radio comentators on 2GB had a novel idea to stop the scam emailers... simply put a charge of a few cents per email sent. Wouldn't really hurt the people sending 'real' email... but the ones that pump out tens of thousands a day from various databases?????

The problem is the scam emails don't originate in aus, they'll be hurting Aussie company's for no reason. Kinda sounds like something the vic gov would come up with thou, to improve revenue.

[XD 351 Ute]

Originally Posted by xtremerus

New Telsta one the other day said it attached my bill as trial paperless billing.
Said it was a pdf file.
But attachment was a zip file, and account No. made up.
DELETE

The wife received the same email the next day as well, different account No.
She doesn't have a Telsra account.
DELETE

Thanks for posting this, as Telstra are trying to get people to stop using the paper bills they send in the mail.
They want people to receive them by e-mail, and I checked my e-mail just now, as I had received a legit Telstra one the other day.
Lucky for me it was real, as I've opened it already....

Ed

[Pedro]

Now I got another one today from "American Express" telling me my statement was ready and to "click here". It was exactly the same as the usual Amex e-mail, so I opened the statement link and it went to what you'd think was an Amex site, but it had a picture of the card and asked you to fill in all the numbers plus the confirmation code.
Straight away I saw that this was bogus as Amex or any other card site wouldn't ask for that information.

Would love to come face to face with one of these scammers.

[NickyN]

Don't you wonder just how many users actually fill out the information though? Whatever the number, it must be enough for these scammers to keep doing it.

[Pedro]

Was on the news tonight; Australians lose $1.6 billion in scams each year, so it's a pretty lucrative business.

[rjr]

I even got the Telstra one in my Telstra email account.

It also has a very serious bot attached to it which was caught by Malwarebytes so be careful.

[NickyN]

Maybe if less people were victims these scams would just dry up and go away.....or maybe wishful thinking.

[MITCHAY]

If you are ever suspicious about a link just hover over it and you can usually tell if it's dodgy or not.

For the more advanced people just have a look at the email headers to see what you're dealing with. The email address shown and what is in the headers is very different a lot of the time.

Government departments will never ask for your details via email and if you haven't booked a flight and get one from an airline then it is probably 100% dodge.

[cheap]

• scam e-mails
• torrents
• porn

that where most of the internet bandwidth goes