Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms Latest scam

Aren't I lucky? I don't even have a Nat West account.

Dear Customer

We want you to know that we are enhancing the biometric system.

As we upgrade our online banking system, we implemented biometric approval on our app to combat fraudulent access to our customers' accounts.

As a result, you need to re-register your online banking account.

Please keep in mind that if you've been already biometrically registered, you must erase your existing biometrics and re-register for Online Banking to proceed.

However, we have restricted all your banking activities until completion of this process. It’s easy to update them – Press the Get Started button

This stuff is so transparent... I guess this is in response to the latest news that banks may remove any purchase limit. Strikes me as a bad move

On-line fraud and contact scam attempts are just getting out of hand

There hardly isn't a day goes by where I don’t receive a call either through the business or my personal mobile or an email scam

Recent ones:

Sky ringing me up on my mobile (displaying a genuine Sky customer telephone number) saying they would like to offer a substantial discount on my account for being a loyal customer. Initially I thought it might be genuine until they asked for my email address that was registered to my account and asked me to spell it out rather than ask me for my security telephone password that I’d set up with them

I kept them talking, giving a false email to see how far it went and how the scam was going to work

Anyway after 20 mins of me pretending I’d received an email from them and that my mobile internet connection was a bit dodgy I worked out what the scam was, they wanted to log into my sky account to get all my details

They realised I’d given them false information and got really nasty

I’ve since had 3 calls from that same scam call centre saying the same thing each time displaying different telephone numbers so they are difficult to block

One we get at work every week is this

A phone call from our energy provider (they get it right probably because it’s on a data base or our receptionist has said we are under contract with them)

Anyway they say there is a problem reading our smart meter and they want to book in an engineer to visit

But first before they can book in the engineer, they just need to go through some security questions

You can guess the rest

Even if they don’t get into our financial bank details, they can sell the information on as it will give them how long our contract is with our current supplier

Sometimes when I’m feeling in the mood I string them along for a bit of sport

Usually the email headers clearly show that the sender is not the bank. Unfortunately elderly and other people who are not particularly IT savvy can easily fall into the trap.
The email service providers should have systems in place with algorithms that identify this type of phishing and block the forwarding of such emails.
Normaly banks do not, or at least should not, send emails with links. Any email that contains certain keywords in the title or the text, and a link, should be automatically rejected. There are already black list systems for spam, phishing, and malware however these can often be too agressive as most emails are sent through shared servers. An AI based email filtering system would probably give better results.

To my mind it is time that email service providers had a legal obligation to filter dangerous emails.

What I also find annoying is that earlier on the PC with an old mail program, the real sender's email was always visible; the old computer was much too stupid to display anything else. But today, for example, on the iPad or iPhone, you see a faked email. If I want to see the correct sender as an email, I first have to click twice on this name of the sender's email. I don't know if this can be changed in the settings.
Incidentally, I admit that three weeks ago I fell for a scam email. It wasn't anything highly criminal, but it was so cleverly done that I was very annoyed with myself and my gullibility.
I had just renewed my Bahncard on the Deutsche Bahn website (a card that costs money and with which I save 25% of the fare for a year).
A little later, an email came that pretended to be a competition on behalf of Deutsche Bahn. I didn't check who the real sender was, see above, which I always do otherwise. It was only when I clicked on the link in the email that it became clear that it had nothing to do with Deutsche Bahn and that I should take out a subscription to old-fashioned paper magazines. The temporal proximity between my visit to the Deutsche Bahn website and this email had tricked me.+

Yes the ones that come just as you have done something legit with real providers are the worst.
I agree showing the true email address rather than the user having to highlight it would be good.

My good lady used to perform all the on-line household administrative tasks even down to ordering car spares for our cars for me, thus she was ever deleting loads of nuisance advertising and all else filling up her in box whereas by comparison I hardly received any in mine..... Even since I had to take on the full range of admin I was none too bothered by junk mail... Until i had suffered a remote cable misconnection in services supplied by my isp... Yeah well even though I determined the fault was unlikely to be on mt property I had to endure all the usual steps in their procedure requiring two separate engineer visits, one to check out the router and connections, and later a telephone engineer for the local network, who found a inadvertent recent connection in digital interface panel a few streets away...!!!

During all these numerous phone calls it was required at each stage to supply ALL the usual details at every call/email...... and since then I now seem to be targeted by scams in numbers my good lady once was, which causes me to wonder if somewhere along the way it might be possible that folk operating in call centres for one`s ISP might gather and pass on personal details.... Or am I just becoming more of a conspiracy theorist than I may already be.... ?

Heinz no matter how worldly wise we may think ourselves to be.... I fear advancing years makes some of us us ever more vulnerable to rapidly changing technology, and as such we seem to be an ideal target for scammers...

It's worth spending half an hour digging into the capabilities of your chosen mail app to learn how to set up inbound mail filtering rules. It's dead easy to route anything that doesn't come from a whitelist to a 'PotentialJunk Folder' for example, or just delete it straight away.

Quite a lot of ISPs seem to be ok at spotting traditional spam type stuff but are less good at identifying scams. You can set up your whitelist very easily with most email software. Every time you get a legitimate email from someone like your bank or building society, you just add that sender domain to a group. With Mac Mail I then have rules which say things like "If Subject contains 'your account' and sender not in {Whitelist} then move to {Suspect Mail Folder}.

Anything that makes it harder for you to inadvertently click on a link or open an attachment is good for you and bad for scammers..

I became aware of this phrase about 30 years ago. You would have thought that by now we would have exceeded it's possibilities but it appears not.

"Everytime I make this thing more idiot proof all I find is a better level of idiot"

Get this all the time. As suggested easy to spot though. As for the older generation - well I'm one of them