Blog Category: Spam Watch

I have received no less than four text messages, all sent from a different phone number, with a similar message. An alleged “hearing impaired person” wants to know if I can “handle website design for a new company” and wants to know if I “accept credit cards as form of payment”. After the first two texts, I replied no, and please stop texting me. Now I’ve received an email with the subject “Web Design Is Needed” and the message is:

Hello I am Micheal Jay and i am hearing impaired i need know if you can handle website design for a new company and i also need to know if you accept credit cards as form of payment ?

The email I received today was from
michealjayjay@outlook.com and sent from a hotmail account, IP
65.55.90.71

This has all the markers of some kind of scam targeting web designers.

Here are links to similar reports:

http://wolfcreektechnology.com/post/Scam-Targets-Web-Designers

http://blog.ihenix.com/nearly-got-scammed/

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”<sec20106@secmail.org>. 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. 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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Phone Spam: A client of mine just received a cold call from a Washington state 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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One of my clients recently received several email spam messages that she wanted me to pass along. These email spam 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 spam than other generic email spam.

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One of my fabulous clients forwarded me an spam SEO email she received the other day from a company 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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If you, or your a member of your family uses a file sharing program to share things like music, with others – better watch this video from MSNBC. Apparently it’s easy for identity thieves to get into your computer via these programs and get access to all kinds of person info, like tax returns. Very scary stuff – I highly recommend you watch the video I’ve embedded.

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