Woohoo - $5,000,000 left to me in a will!
I'm not sure why but for the last few weeks I have been getting an amazing amount of phishing emails all telling me about the huge amounts of money that have been left to me in the wills of various long-lost relatives as well as other old classics like the Nigerian money transfer scam.
They are all instantly recognisable to me as scams (but I'm sure there will be some people caught out by them). You can usually tell by checking out the actual email address of the sender.
A lot of them are also in terrible English and start with things like "Hello Dear" (which actually reminded me of some of the WA comment bandits!)
However in the last few days I have noticed some much more clever and sinister phishing emails which rather than appealing to greed like the other ones, are appealing to the kind nature of the recipient. They are asking for support for various charities in the run up to Christmas.
As someone who supports a variety of charities I was nearly caught by one today which claimed to be from a UK animal rescue charity - which is a cause I support. I almost clicked on the link but thankfully remembered to check at the last minute and realised it was a phishing scam.
Just a friendly warning to be on the lookout for these types of scams as this seems to be a new breed of them and they are using people's generosity at this holiday season to try to snare the unwary.
Kind Regards
Dave
PS: remember never to click a link in an email. If you want to go to a particular site then either type the url into your browser or search for it in Google (other search engines are available)
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That's true friend. Scammers are desperate to get your hard earn money. I recently had a scammer sent me an e-mail concerning my PayPal account. I was caught off guard, because I have a PayPal account. I actually went along and logged in. But something made me look back at the e-mail. It was a red logo PayPal sign with the URL containing many letters and numbers. The actual logo sign of PayPal is "dark blue P" on top of a"light blue P". I immediately went back to my real PayPal account and change my password. No damages was done. I did the changes in less than two minutes. Had I waited longer, I would have lost a lot. Thanks for the alert. All the best!
Yes it’s when you get one that seems to refer to an account you actually have that you can fall in to the trap.
Just remember to avoid clicking any links in emails
Funny I was just thinking of posting about something like this. Luckily it seems that you got plenty of signs that this email was a scam. My mom was not so lucky on Sunday. She received a pm on messenger from a friend. A link to a YouTube video was included. Now this is nothing out of the ordinary as this particular friend is the head of an blacksmith group that my parents are in. Videos of their meet ups and public demonstrations are often shared in this way. The message was in perfect English and sounded exactly like it had come from her friend. It included details that typically are only known within their group. She clicked and it went thru a pattern where she needed to download YouTube and had to sign in to her Apple ID to download the app. Normally, she would have immediately stopped and called me but she had just upgraded her phone and as normal, she was having to resign into all of her apps. She just thought that YouTube had not loaded when she transferred her profile over. You can probably guess how it went from there. They had almost 8 hours before I was alerted and took care of the problem. Now I wait and see if they got any of my credit card info. I am not terribly worried as I have several layers security in their way but still annoying to deal with. So I guess the lesson here is, the scammers have upped the English skills and learned to do their homework and we must be ever more diligent.
Hi Nicole
Yes I have seen this type of message too and received messages inviting me to click on a video link which then ask me to log in to Facebook or YouTube- and so give away my login details.
Thanks for sharing your experience - it’s something for us all to beware of too.
Hi Dave,
I received one of those will emails a couple of months ago, from an Australian Attorney.
As with offline, it will surface online from time to time.
Thank you for the heads up.
Cassi
The Australian attorney has been in my inbox too as well as some from South Africa, Hong Kong and Venezuela.
Maybe they will invite me on an all expenses paid trip to collect my funds 🤣
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It is amazing to me seeing how much effort people put into being dishonest and stealing rather than just putting that energy into something right, proper, and lasting. They put in so much effort for the fast cash, the easy way. In the end, it doesn't last.
and good advice, never click on a link in an email. Look that up in google search first if you are remotely interested. Me, I have limited time and things to do and learned my lesson about 10 years ago on that adventure when I finally got my first puter. If they are not in my address book, they are gone!
I totally agree. If they put their expertise and effort into legitimate ways of making money they would probably do quite well!