Scam email and phishing

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Another version ….

Hello Sir/Madam.

I am Mr Johnson Christopher the head of audits at North West Capital Fund. On a routine audit check last month, my partner and I discovered a dormant investment account which was opened in 1990 belonging to a foreigner who died on-board the crashed Egypt Air Flight 990 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EgyptAir_Flight_990) in 1999.Our records show that every effort made by our company to track any member of his family or any one as the next of kin has since failed because the deceased died leaving no heir or a will in his file. My professional partner and I have decided to contact you in our bid to locate a matured and trustworthy partner to stand as the next of kin.

We intend to facilitate the transfer of this sum of £12.5Million British Pounds in the Investment Deposit to a safe account overseas. I am therefore proposing that you confidentially partner with us by standing as the next of kin and provide an account or set up a new one that will serve the purpose of receiving this fund. For your assistance in this venture, we are ready to part with a good percentage of the entire funds. After going through the deceased person’s records filed in our office, I discovered that no one has operated this account since 1999 till date and he died without a heir; no one has come forward for this claim, hence the money has been floating.

The information we have on this account is privileged and confidential as no other person has access to this. If we do not remit this money urgently, it would be forfeited and subsequently converted to state funds which may benefit only the shareholders of our company. This money can be approved to you legally and with all the necessary documentary approvals in your name. However, you would be required to show some proof of claim which I will provide you with and also guide you on how to make your applications.

Please do give me a response through my private Fax numbers or email so that I can send you detailed information on the modalities of my proposition. I completely trust you to keep this proposition absolutely confidential. I look forward to your prompt response.

Best Regards,

Johnson Christopher

Senior- Auditor

North West Capital Investment Fund.

Email;christopher41878@yahoo.com

Tel: +447418472997
Fax: +448443576929

🍻

Just because you don't know where you are going doesn't mean any road will get you there.

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Rather than reporting the malspam here – one of thousands going the rounds every single day – you’d be better advised to report the email address as a spammer:

Yahoo’s spam reporting page
and the likes of blacklists, such as CleanTalk

You can also use the email header, to report the IP#. Check out whatismyipaddress.com for details.

It’s better to take action than just mention it 🙂

2 users thanked author for this post.

Elly, OscarCP

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Kirsty,

I am curious: those sites you provided the link to ask for the email address of the sender of the offending email. Most likely this is a fake address, so how can it be useful? How does this work?

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There’s fake email address, then there’s genuine email addresses that aren’t being operated by the original “owner” due to hacking, and those genuine accounts created just for spam. Which are you talking about here???

when I checked the email address in question, it was marked as being a “real” account, and not a known spammer.

Reporting is recommended by many goverment agencies, i.e. U.S. (1 & 2), U.K., Australia, New Zealand, Canada etc.

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Elly

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@wavy this isn’t a new spam email – it’s been doing the rounds for at least a couple of years! Inflation hasn’t changed the price in the meantime 😉

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Elly

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I feel better after reporting spam such as these to SpamCop.  I’m not certain that it does a lot of good, but, to repeat, it makes me feel better.  Are there other spam-reporting entities, any that have any teeth?

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ScotchJohn wrote:

Are there other spam-reporting entities, any that have any teeth?

That depends on your jurisdiction, and the company who “supplied” the email address. See above, for some such information.

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Elly

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Kirsty wrote:

Reporting is recommended by many goverment agencies, i.e. U.S. (1 & 2), U.K., Australia, New Zealand, Canada etc.

Kirsty – I can’t speak for the others, but the UK’s response to computer and online fraud was irrevocably compromised by this report.

In the UK, this needs to be relaunched, from the ground up, but recent events have probbably pushed this off the top of the to-do pile.  That was what was behind my question on whether the reporting entities had any teeth.

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Reporting to the police is likely to be met with the response that article appears to discuss (sorry, I don’t have a subscription, so cannot see the whole article). The links I posted were for the cybersecurity dedicated areas, not law enforcement.

Reporting to law enforcement is appropriate in some genuine dangerous circumstances, but not for your run-of-the-mill spam emails.

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ScotchJohn wrote:

I feel better after reporting spam such as these to SpamCop. I’m not certain that it does a lot of good, but, to repeat, it makes me feel better. Are there other spam-reporting entities, any that have any teeth?

Yeah Spamcop is very good. Free, and does all the technical sender-domain-etc. ‘tracing’ work for you. All you need to learn is how to copy/paste an email with full headers (not hard). I see no need for learning/using another similar service.

I used to report every spam/scam email, until doing so got me on a spammer’s hitlist, and started receiving hundreds of ‘bounce’ emails from an email domain, with my email address forged as the sender. Spamcop warn about the possibility of people who report spam copping this sort of revenge. They try to remove all recipient-identifying info from reported emails, but sometimes large alphanumeric strings within the email are used, obfuscated enough so that it’s not apparent it identifies the spam recipient.

Spamcop give the use the option of which domains involved (sender, mentioned in the spam etc.) emails to send, which can be selected by ticking (checking) or unchecking. One trick I’ve developed is to surf to the domain of each, if I don’t know it. If that domain has no main page, the chances are that it’s specifically designed for the use of spammers, and sending anything to it would result in either more spam, or no action at all.

I read that Microsoft take spam very, very seriously and spend millions on combating it, since the total cost to their servers is high (and to their reputation too, I’d think). I’ve no doubt that anything in my Junk Mail folder, if I don’t move it to another folder, even when I delete it, is followed up by them in attempts to shut down the spammers involved… and they are sometimes successful at this.

No doubt Yahoo, Google etc. (all very large email providers) do the same. So now I only report spam if it’s particularly obnoxious. Only the worst of scam emails really… scammers tend to be small operations so have less chance of tracing a spam report to me and attempting to exact revenge.

If I had my time over I’d pick a much more unguessable email address, i.e. one which wouldn’t be found by the random combination of personal names, titles and common words (which is how spammers add many email addresses to their lists).
For most website signups I use a (free) Spamgourmet email address. There’s a learning curve but it’s worth it. Nine out of ten websites will accept a Spamgourmet email address, and there are multiple domains etc. one can specify for the same destination email account. My Spamgourmet email stats until today: 13,350 forwarded, 83,596 ‘eaten’. Nice!!!

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ScotchJohn

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Steve – most interesting.  Thanks for taking the time.

I may be kidding myself, but I think I may have contributed to lessening the amount of spam coming from AmazonAWS servers.  I got fed up with SpamCop reporting to abuse#amazonaws.com@devnull.spamcop.net, which was no report at all, so I started reporting direct to Amazon directly: ‘abuse@amazonaws.com’ ‘ec2-abuse@amazon.com’.

I may be deluding myself, but the incidence of spam from AmazonAWS seems to have gone way down.  If so, good!

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Oh, a caveat re Spamgourmet (since I recommended it). For one in every few dozen websites you sign up to with a Spamgourmet email account, all emails they send to that account will just disappear. This would be because those websites send email to Spamgourmet (the constructed email address indicates whose Spamgourmet account it’s for) , and Spamgourmet’s server code then modified the emails with changed sender address, i.e. the ‘real’ email address the Spamgourmet account owner specified when opening their Spamgourmet account. Some peculiar/unusual email .eml formatting is apparently not recognised properly by Spamgourmet servers, meaning in those cases any new website account you tried to open will not be usable (as you won’t get the confirmation email). No biggie, when that happens I use my secondary ‘standard’ email account, or my main one if the vendor looks reliable. However if you used a spamgourmet account to buy anything online, without testing it first by opening an account and checking you receive the confirmation mail before ordering, then you’re going to end up annoying the hell out of the pay website’s Support department. So my own rules are:  never use my Spamgourmet email address on any website I’m paying to join, or for any sort of event ticket, and when ordering open the account and respond to the verification email before ordering.

When you do use Spamgourmet to open an account at another website, you can, by the way, specify for each constructed email address how many emails you want to receive maximum for that address/website, which it can be changed later (to zero if they spam you and ignore your changing preferences/closing your account, or sell your email address to spammers, or get hacked and your details stolen, all of this happens). Around one in thirty websites won’t allow any sort of Spamgourmet address (maybe for reasons stated), when that happens I try to use a secondary non-shell email address (Outlook.com or GMail or whatever) if they seem in the least dodgy. My main email account, for ‘direct’ email, is only for those I trust. So not trivially simple, but hey I’ve avoided having to deal with over 83,000 spam emails, so I’m getting way good value for money (it’s free).

Asus N53SM & N53SN 64-bit laptops (Win7 Pro & Win10 Pro 64-bit multiboots), venerable HP Pavilion t760 32-bit desktop (XP & Win7 Pro multiboot), Oracle VirtualBox VM's: XP & Win7 32-bit, XP Mode, aged Samsung Galaxy S4, Samsung Galaxy Tab A 2019s (8" & 10.1"), Blu-ray burners, digital cameras, ext. HDDs (latest 5TB!), AnyDVD, Easeus ToDo Backup Home, Waterfox, more. Me: Aussie card-carrying Windows geek.

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[8string]

I track spam and phishing attacks for multiple businesses on a daily basis. The notion of reporting one spam or fishing event is absolutely absurd. If you want to do it and it makes you feel better, great, but it’s not gonna change a thing. There are literally hundreds (maybe thousands )of fishing attacks every day on most businesses and individuals. The better email vendors out there like Google, Microsoft and others are filtering much of it before it ever reaches your desk. If you find yourself swimming in spam, Then you might want to find a better email vendor. Personally I’ve used both Gmail and outlook and they filter huge amounts of spam every day out of my inbox. If I had to get a guess as to which was better I’d say that Gmail was better at filtering then outlook but not by a whole lot. If you really are still having problems, then look at installing your own spam filter or paying for one. One of my clients uses Go Daddy for their vendor of Microsoft products, and I’ve set them up with the advanced filtering from Go Daddy at a small price. It is much more effective than the regular spam filtering that Go Daddy provides. It has reduced Spam dramatically though it is catching enough normal Mail that I have to check it every five days or so. so focus on filtering your inbox. I recommend that all my clients turn on outlook junk mail filtering to “high”and then check their junk mail inbox once a day to make sure they’re not having good stuff caught. Good luck on that!

dictated to my iPad. If there’s some spelling errors it’s OK

• This reply was modified 3 years, 3 months ago by 8string.

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