Fraud

I find some of the scams becoming increasingly convincing.

Here's not a very good example :

In an email coming in as:

    From:     PayPal
    Subject:     Important Please Read
    Date:     6 July 2011 09:52:20 GMT+01:00

Dear valued PayPaI« Customer,

We need your help resolving an issue with your account. To give us time to work together on this, we've temporarily limited what you can do with your account until the issue is resolved.

What's the problem?

We noticed some unusual activity on the credit card linked to your PayPaI« account.

Case ID Number: PP-001-212-055-698

How you can help

It's usually pretty easy to take care of things like this. Most of the time, we just need a little more information about your account.

To help us with this and to find out what you can and can't do with your account until the issue is resolved, please proceed to our secure webform by clicking here.

Thanks,
PayPaI«

When the "clicking here" leads to an address other than Paypal which makes it easy to spot.

In practice I never respond to any request no matter how convincing but choose to initiate the whole process of contacting myself - that is if I think there may be a problem.

An impressive scam

No doubt the crooks will get cleverer and cleverer as they try to persuade us that we can have something for nothing.

This one is different (we certainly have some creative thinkers about):

From General Peter W.Chiarelli - generalpeterw.chiarelli@gmail.com

This is General Peter W. Chiarelli , Vice Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, I was deployed to Iraq at the beginning of the war in Iraq. I would like to share some highly personal classified information about my personal experience and role which I played in the pursuit of my career serving under the U.S army which was at the fore-front of the war in Iraq.

I would hold back certain information for security reasons for now until you have found the time to visit the BBC website stated below to enable you have an insight into what I intend sharing with you, believing that it would be of your desired interest one-way or the other. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2988455.stm

Get back to me having visited the above website to enable us discuss in a more clarifying manner to the best of your understanding. I will be vivid and coherent in my next message in this regards, meanwhile, could you send me an email confirming that you have visited the site and that you have understood my intentions? I will await your thoughts.

Thanks,
Best Regards
General Peter W. Chiarelli,

Checking the bbc link we get a genuine story.

Checking Google we get a genuine General with email to match

Someone has taken some trouble to fabricate a realistic story!

Tempted?

I always operate on the theory that you never get something for nothing.

However it's fun dealing with the public when you are genuinely giving something away.

They are rightly suspicious.

Many years ago - (thirty) - I did a stunt on my market stall, here in Ulverston (I sold what were called "Health Foods").

I used dolly pegs to pin up at least twenty genuine pound notes around my stall and offered them to anyone who would write a silly letter to my credit card company!

The public were very wary!

I had just received two letters from them the credit card company within days.

One was offering to increase my credit rating dramatically.

The other was closing my account down because of none payment of my monthly bill (I had been away on holiday).

Both were signed with realistic signatures, inviting me to ring them.

I proceeded to track these people down , insisting on each call , to speak to them personally because this is precisely what they were inviting me to do in their printed letter.

It took some time and many phone calls (but I was onjoying myself) to get to the genuine article - I was very persistent!

I then faced the two people with their contradictory messages.

One person, John Fox of Welfare State fame took me up on my offer of a pound and wrote a letter which I sent off and got published in the Evening Mail - of course!

Any other scams you've spotted that are very convincing.

Fraudsters up to clever tricks

Dear user of PayPal services,
This email is to inform you that we had to block your PayPal account because this ip 86.124.16.142 accessed your account 3 times and tryed to change your billing information. We apologise for the inconvenience but the safety of your account is our main priority.

To remove the limitation login to your PayPal account!
To remove the limitation, read carefully and complete all the steps listed in the link above. Thank you for using PayPal!The PayPal Team

Some messages are very plausible. (Though how about the spelling?)

The way I check them out is always to look at the link they give by mousing over but not pressing.

This is invariably NOT what you would expect and is very dodgy.

In this case www.z58.org/as

With my internet provider I get a message that this is not the link it says it is!