Don't fall for the latest cyber fraud scam

As an intelligent aware person who daily receives 10-25 such emails per day, and hugely aware of the 'if it is too good to be true it probably is...' line, this scams are psychologically getting better and better and the payback from the scams is clearly making millionaires out of cyber criminals.

I still wonder if one day I'm going to get somehow caught out.

Distracting typos from the above article:-

'What you can do is to right click on the link, select 'copy hyperlink' from the drop down menu and then past the result into notepad (with should strip out all hidden coding).'

And the stupid :- 'to good' instead of too good. There is enough to read nowadays without annoying errors to slow things up.

I never get emails of this type. Either BT are better at preventing trash such as this from entering my in-box or perhaps you have responded to scams of this sort in the past an your email address has been shared by potential scammers.

The typos in the article are just the sort of thing that alerts me to phishing attacks.

Thanks for a good article and useful reminder.

I do wish people would stop using the ugly word 'typos' and instead correctly call them 'typographical errors'.

Come on guys, let''s have a bit of tolerance. The author is no doubt paid to write to deadlines, and we live in a world where many people are unable to construct written sentences, so in my book one or two typos per article is permissible. I'll even overlook the use of hyphens instead of commas. Perfectionism is more often a curse than a virtue.

My son paid for a scam Ebay purchase by taking money to the bank and paying into the scammers bank account, thinking this should be safe. When the scammer was exposed by others, the bank (HSBC) refused to help even though it would have been easy for them to freeze the scammers account until the truth was established. They could see his activities on their screen but declined to help in any way. Should we sue them for aiding and abetting a fraud?

How often does a white collar criminal working out of an office and cheating hundreds simultaneously ever wind up with the sort of sentence a petty thief collects for repeated offences against one victim at a time?

The law is there primarily to protect property, and that means sparing the propertied the severest consequences of delinquency. Class justice at its finest.

In the States, now and then, a fraudster in a collar and tie gets the book thrown at him 'pour encourager les autres'. Bernie Madoff got 150 years. But we don't do things that way, old boy. What's the longest a naughty director, financier or pedlar of securities has ever served in a British jail?

Ronnie Biggs got longer, I'll bet.

Another one to watch out for is a phone call from someone pertaining to be from say Microsoft.

They will say that they have identified that you computer could be running a bit slow and they can the problem sorted for you by following the following steps.

Open Accessories the Run.exe

They have probally downloaded some virus during the telephone conversation,

because they ask you about your computer and the operating system also.

I don't know what happens next, because the minute the asked me to carry out the Run.exe I put the phone down.

What is certain the authorities are not interested in cyber crimes, more like protecting them.

The US wants our hackers, but will not investigated nor prosecute their own, for example I regularly see that my machine is connected to 64.24.139.64 (without so much as a by your leave), and that happens automatically and when I check who they are, PAETEC-Starnet Division, I know I have never dealt with them, but the FBI just ain't interested.

I pay my taxes, even some American taxes, so I deserve protection. They pass anti hacking legislation, only to enforce when the administration are inconvenienced, they never look after the people who pay or contribute to their salaries, and why should they, we are canon fodder, their to be put in front to take the shrapnel, and discarded whilst they grab the eye catching headlines.showing how brilliant they are. Self serving more like it, no money is made available to catch the spammers, minor hackers until their shabby little secrets may be exposed. Guilty by inaction.

I reality the Americans tax their non doms more heavily than their locals, discrimination, and as we pay their taxes, we deserve better protection (paying proportionately more tax), particularly when it their criminals doing the spamming and hacking.

And oh by the way, as I pay their tax, why don't I have a vote, remember, no taxation without representation!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I am getting so many suspicous emails, often with attachments that I will not open. I am currently bombarded with a repeat email from the United States Postal Service (USPS) - I don't believe it - to say there is a problem with a delivery and can I check on the attached label? No way. Another very frequent one is from a medium called Tara who tells me that my life will change forever if I open the attachment and send her money. I am also getting emails from very sexy young women who want to get to know me but I find I have to subscribe to a dating service to contact them. I am an old man and I would love it to be true but desperate as I am I am not falling for that. And what about my lottery winnings that I can collect if I open up an offshore account with a few thousand pounds of my own. White collar criminals can cause just as much misery and suffering as conventional robbers and thugs and they need the same tough justice for stealing the hopes, dreams and savings of the elderly and vulnerable.

If anybody out there wishes to help in a small way against this trash, you can forward the emails to: phishing-report@us-cert.gov and: spam@uce.gov

UK related banking scams can be forwarded to: reports@banksafeonline.org.uk

Its the consequences of your actions - for the crminals there are none. The govt makes rules that only the law abiding worry about following.

95% of all crime like this is not followed up, and if it is then the paltry sentences are laughable, whilst the costs to find the crminal and prosecute are huge. If you made £500K in a year on this crime and get 1yr in jail (6months tops actual) - hey you just made 10yrs tax free at 50Kpa - whats to worry about.