Scam Email Alert

If you should get an email with this alerting you to some payment you don’t remember- take note…it is a scam. Do NOT click on any links. If you are worried, go to your accounts online and check to see if there are any charges to this amount. This is showing it was ‘paid via credit card and I only have one. I easily checked my account through my iPhone app and found no activity.

Also take note of where the email is coming from. I noticed it looked legit until you saw the actual email was from an AOL account. A real business will have an official email with their web site domain included in it.

You can also do a Google search with the email and add scam to see if anything shows up. I don’t even bother with that- I just delete or report the scam.

To report spam/scam email. Take note of the email. If it is a gmail, yahoo, aol, or other type email, you can report to them about the specific account. For example giranpour@aol.com is from AOL so I google AOL scam email and got this page.

http://mail.security.aol.com

Which includes an email I can forward the scam email to them.

aol_phish@abuse.aol.com

Done. Reported.

If you have questions or comments, please post.

 

A quick email scam alert: FedEx

I wanted to share with you a scam I received in my email. I catch them pretty quick with a little trick I learned.

If you take note of this email, you can see they generously provided a button in which I can print out a shipping label.

Take note of the email address. It says its from FedEx, but the email itself is ‘perthholdings.com’. This is the first clue.

When I hover my mouse cursor over the ‘get shipment label’ link, my ‘status bar’ (located at the bottom left of my Chrome window) shows the link doesn’t take me to FedEx at all but somewhere called arncliffedentalcare.com in Austrailia. This doesn’t mean a scam artist is even at this place of business, but that its hacked into their account.

Fortunately, my gmail caught this and sent it to my SPAM folder.

Want to activate your ‘status bar’? Click here. The page gives instructions on how to turn it on in various browsers.

Technorati Tags: email scam,pc help,tech support,learnthepc.net

Craigslist Scam

I had an interesting scam happen to me via Craigslist, so I decided to share that experience. Others might learn from my mistakes.

Have no fear, the scam didn’t go far. When I sense something isn’t right, where instinct and common sense tugs at my senses, I listen to it.

I received not one but two emails from people needing laptops formatted and restores. This isn’t a difficult job to do. I’ve done it a lot. They also wanted MS Office installed, but didn’t mention which version. MS Office comes in a ‘home and student’ version, and then there’s the ‘professional’ version.

When they didn’t answer my questions about this, but instead, insisted I give them a quote to get the computers done, my common sense started rattling. Why hurry? Why not care about the difference, in both price of the software as well as the purpose of the software?

Then I asked where they were located. My business is very local. I have on-site service, where I come to the home or business and work there. These people wanted to ship the computers to me.

Um…what? You want to ship the computers to someone you don’t know, to do basic formatting and restore work? That’s when I really found the situation strange.

I did a Google search Craigslist + restore laptop + scam and found a number of message board forums on the topic. The idea is that they send you a check, which isn’t any good, and they immediately say they overpaid you. They want you to send the difference.

I emailed both and said I wasn’t taking the job.

So here is what we can learn from this;

– Check the email. If the email comes from Hotmail, Yahoo, or Gmail, or other free sites, take it as a red flag.

– Get their full name and company. With that, you can then search the Internet and find out more about them. Neither of these people showed up at all online.

– Use common sense. If their answers to basic questions sound weird or not right, don’t deal with them.

– Be careful on Craigslist. I’ve since changed my post where I will not in any way accept computers via mail.

Technorati Tags: craigslist,scam,laptop.repair,learnthepc,computer training,office assistant,web design