Blog Category: Spam & Scam Watch

One of my clients got an email today with this subject: RV: UPDATE YOUR E-MAIL SECURITY IMMEDIATELY (IUEU). It was from “Squirrel Mail Security Team”<[email protected]>. Since my client uses DreamHost as his hosting company (as do I and we both use SquirrelMail) I immediately contacted DreamHost and they said the email was a fake scam. I’ve pasted the body of the actual email below - but if you get this email, DELETE IT. Do not click on the link inside it, do not open the attachment.

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Here’s a good example of what WordPress spam looks like, disguised as a comment.

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Every morning I sit down in front of my computer and go through my email inbox. The first thing I do is remove all the spam that’s come in overnight. It used to just annoy me, but now I’ve discovered a way to get revenge, and hopefully annoy the spammers in the process.

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I wrote a blog article last year about online allegations that were being made against Yelp. Recently I read an article in the Huff Post that reported that:

“Two law firms, Beck & Lee from Miami and The Weston Firm in San Diego, have filed a class action lawsuit in Los Angeles federal court alleging unfair business practices by local business review and rating website operator Yelp.”

Read the full article from TechCrunch.com

A client of mine just received a cold call from a Washington SEO company, who offered a free website review to see if his website “would be negatively impacted by an upcoming Google Platform Change”. Scary huh?

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Whenever one of my clients has a good or bad experience with a website marketing company, I make sure to post these experience here in my blog. A client notified me of problems with a company I had never heard of before, “zipweb.com”.

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All of us hate spam, those unsolicited emails we get from individuals or businesses who want something from us. But if you get spam from someone who is using a professional service, like MyEmma or Constant Contact, there’s something you can do about it.

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If you’ve gotten an email with the subject “Compensation Notification (Read Attachment)” - do NOT open the attachment - this is a known scam and you should immediately delete the email.

The email looks like this:

Subject: Compensation Notification (Read Attachment)
From: OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT [email protected]
Reply-to: [email protected]
Cc: recipient list not shown

It has a .txt attachment.

Again, don’t open the attachment - just delete the email.

One of my clients recently received several email scam messages that she wanted me to pass along. These email scam messages were a little different from the ones that I usually receive, in that they specifically mentioned products and services that she offered. In other words, they were a little harder to recognize as scams than other generic email spam.

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Maybe you’ve already heard of this issue, but I discovered it recently and wanted to share it with my readers. There are folks out there who are claiming that a popular online review site, Yelp, will take down negative reviews if small business owners pay them to. Seriously?!

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I recently was contacted by a prospective client who wanted work done on his existing website. He sent me the URL of his website to review. Like many of you who judge whether a company is trustworthy before you decide to do business with them, I do the same thing to decide whether a potential customer is running a valid business. The last thing I want to do is work on a website for a company that might be a scam.

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One of my clients got an unsolicited email from “Blue Ridge Hosting” that I wanted to pass along. I’m not sure whether this is a scam or not, but I’ve emailed both the person who originated the email and submitted a contact form via the Blue Ridge Hosting website - and to date have receive no response from either. I’m always suspicious when clients’ domain expiration dates are being watched by other people, and so to be safe, wanted to show you what the email looked like.

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I just read about this. If you have a Facebook account, I highly recommend clicking on the link and watching the video from WebCastr.com:

“Computer security specialists warn that Facebook users have been hit with a series of data-stealing attacks in the past week as cyber crooks increasingly stalk social-networking websites. This attacked is called 419 Scam.”

Here’s the link: http://webcastr.com/videos/informational/facebook-cyber-crooks-target.html

Anytime someone contacts you via the internet asking for money, whether it’s via email or via a social networking site like Facebook, it’s a good idea to be skeptical and attempt to verify directly with the individual - even if the individual is someone you think you know.

One of my fabulous clients forwarded me an spam SEO email she received the other day from Marc Shneider, Ph.D. from Global Vibrations in Washington DC and in the course of investigating it, I found some amazing things I wanted to share with you small business website owners who are looking to hire someone to do SEO for your website.

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This seems to be the month for search engine related spam emails. One of my clients just forwarded this one to me, and it’s unique in that their website doesn’t function at all. While the email does have a domain based email address, I found it odd they didn’t list their website in their signature. Read on to find out why.

(Update 3/8/11: I’ve been contacted by a person from “Keyword Placement Inc”, and they claim that they never sent out these spam emails. I’ve invited them to add their comment to this post. KeywordPlacementInc.com is a working website for a SEM company located and registered in Nevada.)

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Today one of my clients forwarded me a spam email she received from “Victoria Ulter - Business Development / Marketing” and when I read the address, it sounded familiar: “6556 Mother Load Dr”. Why did this sound familiar? Well, it’s because it’s the same address as was listed in the Valerie Zalburn spam mail. Once again, let’s review how to identify spam: no company name, no company address or phone, no company website and a generic return email address (like this one had [email protected]).

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I’ve just gotten a PayPal phishing email, one that tries to trick people into disclosing their pay account login information. If you get this email, delete it!

Subject: Live IP Verification
From: PayPal (return address is [email protected])
Reply-To: [email protected]
To: undisclosed-recipients

We noticed one or more login attempts from a foreign IP address.

Log In now to resolve the problem.

The link goes to: http://windowmevision.co.za/live/read.php which of course isn’t PayPal, in fact, it’s a website that is redirected to: http://sa-in.com/catalog/images/.live/id.htm and this website has duplicated PayPal’s logon screen.

Again, this is NOT a PayPal website, it’s a phishing scam.

You can report fake PayPal emails here: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=xpt/Marketing/securitycenter/antiphishing/PPPhishingReport-outside

And fake PayPal websites here: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_external-webform&f=pps_spf

This website is still live, so the more folks that report it, the better.

Ok, so I stole the title “Keeping them honest” from Anderson Cooper’s 360 podcast - but it fits the topic of this blog post. If you’re a regular reader, you know that I often wrote posts warning small business owners about scams. Most of the time, folks who read my blog say thank you. Every once in a while though, it makes someone really angry.

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I get spam all the time, but this one was so outrageous, I thought I’d share it with my blog readers. It’s from “Mr. Patrick K. W Chan” from “Hang Seng Bank Limited in Hong Kong”. The funniest thing about this particular scam attempt, it that it’s from a German version of Hotmail (Arcor.de) although you’re supposed to respond to a Yahoo email account. I believe it’s a good example of an “advanced fee fraud” or “Nigerian scam”.

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I haven’t written a blog article about phishing yet, but last night I received an email that was classically trying to trick people into revealing their PayPal login information. The funniest thing about this particlar phishing attempt, was that they actually mispelled PayPal in the “from” field, spelling it “PayPla”.

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