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jimmy m
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23 Feb 2020, 12:32 pm

I receive around 100 emails per day. Most are unsolicited sales emails pitching some product that I have no need for. They are nuisance emails. But some fall within the category of scams or phishing emails. These can be dangerous. So it is important to be able to recognize these quickly. So I thought I might discuss two emails that I received a couple minutes ago.

I am a member of one big box store and my credit card associated with this store sends out yearly rewards this time of year. So two things triggered an immediate red flag that this was a scam were:
* The originating source of the email did not match the box store or the credit card company. It was bogus. It read <info@25799630772476406850.com>
* Most of these scam emails contain very simple mistakes. In this case the header read "Your balance: $102.322". There is no way that my reward would be a fraction of a cent.

I purchase merchandise through Amazon. In the second email it claimed I was about to receive a reward from AmazonPrime in the form of a gift card. There are many things wrong in this email and as a result triggered a red flag:
* So the first thing is I look at the originator of the email. It was bogus. It read <kj76dRGfsnInhg2qH@web01.groups.io>
* The reward was from AmazonPrime and I am not a user of AmazonPrime.
* The first line of the email read "Your Extrat 100$ Gift Card Rewards..." Has Arrived.
There were many mistakes here. Extra was misspelled as Extrat. 100$ is not the way you write one hundred dollars except maybe in Europe or come other countries.
* This email was designed in the form of a shipping notification. It gave an arrival date of today, Sunday. This is very abnormal because in general shippers do not work on Sundays.

In both emails, it is quite obvious that the originators posted these scam emails from outside the U.S. because of the grammatical mistakes.

So be alert and don't fall for these. They are rip-offs.


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EzraS
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23 Feb 2020, 2:26 pm

Yeah I always look at the email address.
I think what they are after is getting you to click on a link.
I used to get ones claiming to be FedEx holding a package for me.
But of course it is always FedEx <blarp@ringadingdong.com>

There is another course of action that one can take:



nick007
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23 Feb 2020, 5:43 pm

Good things to keep an eye out for Jimmy. One thing I noticed about lots of those emails is at the very bottom of the email is part of a story or poem. It's just some random rambling nonsense stuff that makes no sense like "& then she walked along the beach looking at the ocean not noticing" & the story goes on for paragraphs & is completely irrelevant.
Does anyone have a clue as to why the emails contain that gibberish :?:


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5wiits 4 Ma 5wiit
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23 Feb 2020, 6:46 pm

I am new, yet I cannot post links. Why is that?



nick007
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23 Feb 2020, 6:48 pm

5wiits 4 Ma 5wiit wrote:
I am new, yet I cannot post links. Why is that?
You have to make a certain number of posts before your allowed to post links. It's an attempt to reduce spam. I'm not sure of the number of posts you have to make but I'd guess it's like 10/25.


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Fnord
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27 Feb 2020, 7:56 pm

nick007 wrote:
... Does anyone have a clue as to why the emails contain that gibberish?
It’s there to throw off the A.I. spam detectors, mainly by mimicking the vocabulary of a personal message.


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blooiejagwa
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02 Mar 2020, 11:15 pm

I actually fell for a scam text message and link as I wrote about it here.. But members like KraftieKortie and IsabellaLinton helped by telling me what to do.

I had given them my details unknowingly thinking I was signing into my bank account as the page that the text message linked to looked almost identical.
It sounded realistic too (that ur electric company is reimbursing u for overcharging accidentally a previous month)

What those WP members told me was

Aside from changing cards, and changing the password, you also have to inform the bank and the cops if need be.


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