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I often tell my clients who are sometimes confused with these invoice/payment demand scams that one dead give away is they are often addressed to "Dear customer..." etc. rather than their real name.
Today I've had a couple of spam emails that are trying harder than ones I've seen previously! Today's emails have used both my real name and address - no doubt this will trick more people... :¬(
(Gmail's spam filters catch them nicely)
Here's the sample text:
Dear "My Actual Name",
Regarding the amount due 971.17 GBP, we act on behalf of Steatite Blazepoint Ltd in order to collect the outstanding account value of your debt.
We would like to remind you that the amount above was due for payment on 25.03.16 but as no payment has been received, your invoice is now considered as overdue. Please find a printable version of your invoice at the following link:
>>> Dodgy link removed <<<
Original invoice will be sent out to:
"My Actual Name"
"My Full Postal Address"
In order to avoid further costs, please forward the payment to us and transfer the amount due not later than 10.04.16
Regards,
John Lewis
For reference here's a related BBC News article on this type of spam:
Fraudsters hide behind fake invoices
[s]Hmmm...[/s]
I accept I'll always get a certain amount of spam because I have a website with a contact address available for the world to see, but yesterday was just way beyond anything that had happened before. So far today there have only been 4 spams so, fingers crossed, whatever you're doing is working.
I Tweeted* Freeola to see if others have seen the same.
Plenty of dodgy invoice and document attachments and also some spam spoofing my own domain. I forwarded some samples to Freeola last week.
Gmail zapped the lot but it's obviously not a good thing.
[s]Hmmm...[/s]
*Their newsletter asks for people to get in touch ;¬)
... but it obviously worked, as one vigilant user reported that his spam was "missing"!
Maybe I just got all of his ;¬)
icons wrote:
[i]I'm getting very fed up with the level of spam coming through despite having the Freeola filters set to almost the highest level. Time to look for an alternative I fear.
I can vouch that our resident genius Hmmm...'s forwarding through Gmail trick works (see earlier comments on this thread), since I tried this I have had no spam at all (and I was getting LOADS!!!). I do believe this is not just a Freeola issue, check around other providers are also experiencing problems ATM. In Freeola's defence it must be very difficult to filter nuisance mails when the senders constantly change email addresses. I would regularly block senders through EmailPro only for exactly the same mails to come through from a different address. Gmail zaps them all though, it's awesome.
Hope this helps.[/i]
Yup, it's pretty bad across the board at present, we're even getting spam sent to our support ticket system!
I get a fair amount through to my sky email address too, so it's certainly not just a Freeola issue; Sky, like many other providers, supply email addresses run through Yahoo, so I would imagine that any Yahoo-based provider will be seeing the issue too, as will almost any provider that are in any way connected to web hosting etc.
We do make every effort to filter out spam, and in fact our Freedom servers have very recently undergone some changes to help reduce the effect. Nothing that a customer would notice directly, other than a reduction in junk mail, but it obviously worked, as one vigilant user reported that his spam was "missing"!
I'm getting very fed up with the level of spam coming through despite having the Freeola filters set to almost the highest level. Time to look for an alternative I fear.
I can vouch that our resident genius Hmmm...'s forwarding through Gmail trick works (see earlier comments on this thread), since I tried this I have had no spam at all (and I was getting LOADS!!!). I do believe this is not just a Freeola issue, check around other providers are also experiencing problems ATM. In Freeola's defence it must be very difficult to filter nuisance mails when the senders constantly change email addresses. I would regularly block senders through EmailPro only for exactly the same mails to come through from a different address. Gmail zaps them all though, it's awesome.
Hope this helps.