The Fightback Ninja

An email from Martin says my transaction of 54.9 Bitcoins is completed and is in my account. That would be worth nearly one million dollars, but it isn’t true of course. The scammer wants me to open my account at Bitciti using the login and password he provides. No-one gives away millions to people they don’t know. This is a simple phishing scam – trying to get my personal information for future…

There are many emails that turn up, that deliberately make no sense. e.g. “Accommodating bidder, our company is rather favour your effect” from airwaylease.com or “Darling Gentleman, Our team is upwards effect joy” from andardas-net.com.br or “Polite consumer, is preferably favour response” from une.eu.com or “Darling master, our partnerships are with partner” from ig.com.br In fact these emails…

Fake Car Parking Fines

The email arrives – it’s a “Notice of intended Prosecution”. Oh dear! The email sender knows my name unlike most scammers. The email does have a company name and logo for Chariot car parks but the sender’s email address is a misspelling charoitcarparks.com which gives it away immediately as a scam. It says I was illegally parked in a private parking space and caused great inconvenience to the…

“Top eye doctors are shocked to learn that this odd Amazonian finger trick sharpens vison effortlessly.” Not really of course – it’s just rubbish from a scammer trying desperately to get you to click to watch a ridiculous video clip for which she gets paid. “The biggest vision breakthrough of the 21st century”. “No more tired eyes or dry eyes” “No more blurry or double vision”. This scammer seems…

An email from Home Depot tells me I have won a Dewalt Extreme Drill. Congratulations to me!  It’s not true of course – the email is from 819378265666120019209111@… which is obviously made-up rubbish from a scammer, plus the sender doesn’t know my name plus most of the email is actually copied from a report about a National Forest. The scammer was trying to get the message through the email…

Scammers call you trying to steal your money or your identity or both. So, why not waste their time, drive them mad and get your own back. Plus while you’re keeping them busy they cannot be scamming someone else. Cathy Simpson came up with an unusual way to have a bit of fun while deflecting cold callers, although it needs a little preparation to really work well. “I used to be plagued with them,…

A post by Lindsey Weiss At Fightback Ninja Blog, we know that cyber threats are more common than most people think. While many aspiring entrepreneurs think they don’t have to worry about cybersecurity until their businesses really take off, no one is immune to these threats. In fact, hackers often single out small companies because they’re easier to infiltrate. Small businesses tend to lack the…

Would anyone choose to pay £3.60 to be connected to a phone number that is well-known and free of charge? The answer to that is that they wouldn’t do it deliberately. However, imagine for example, your car breaks down and you’re stopped in a difficult place and in a hurry somewhere and it’s dark. A quick check on Google on your phone gives you a number for the RAC breakdown service and you call…

The email has a catchy title ‘Thank You For Your Payment’. It claims my subscription to Norton Life has been renewed at a cost of $249.99 which is the wrong price –  the scammer couldn’t be bothered checking on the genuine renewal price. The scammer’s grammar is odd in places and certainly not professional. e.g. “Much thanks to you” or “Your membership will be dynamic in the following 24…

Another repulsive set of emails arrives, about a magical diabetes cure. These ones claim that one handful of a little known fruit taken after dinner each day will instantly bring your blood sugar levels back to normal. There’s also the usual conspiracy theory rubbish – this time about the scientist who discovered the fruit being sacked and ‘Big Pharma’ trying to discredit him. All lies of…

Most people just put the phone down when they receive a call from a scammer. Others may say or shout rude things then slam the phone down and some try to convince the scammer to stop their illegal activities. It doesn’t matter really what you do but you may as well have some fun at the scammer’s expense – after all – she phoned you to steal your money George suggests – One good way I found was to…

Many Western countries allow people to jump the immigration queue as long as they are rich enough. Portugal has a programme called Golden Visas whereby if you have at least 280,000 Euros to invest in Portugal and can meet some other requirements then you can live and work in Portugal and in 5 years time become an EU citizen. Scammers take advantage of schemes like these, to attract people with…

When you go in the supermarket nowadays you’re likely to see plenty of different brands of table salt and sea salt and various ‘fancy’ salts. We all know that salt is a food preservative and flavour enhancer so almost everything you eat will have some salt in naturally or that’s been added. This latest scammer is trying to stir up worries over salt – to further her aim of making money at your…

An email from ‘Wise’ tells me they have restricted my account for my own protection because I haven’t verified my phone number yet. The sender’s email address doesn’t match ‘Wise’, they don’t know my name and there aren’t any real contact details so it’s just a phishing scam. More obviously, I don’t have an account with Wise and have never heard of them so I wont click the link to verify my…

In Australia, the problems of scam email, text messages, calls and more are pretty much the same as in the UK and USA. But the Australian government is fighting back. Their efforts to reduce scam calls have worked well. “In the first 16 months after the Reducing Scam Calls code was put in place, telcos reported blocking over 549 million scam calls to Australian phone numbers, and there has been a…

There are endless companies offering to send out millions of emails to sell your products. Some are genuine businesses that take care over their mailing lists but many are just spammers who buy mailing lists from anyone and send out any rubbish they are paid to. There is also a different approach where you don’t pay for the number of emails sent out but for the number of leads generated from the…

The title is “Add this flower to your diet and burn double the calories”. So, it’s yet another diet scam with some supposed magic ingredient. Forskolin is made from the root of a plant in the Mint family and it is native to Nepal, India and Thailand. It has long been used in traditional Ayurvedic medicine and some believe it helps weight loss, asthma and a variety of other medical problems. But…