phishing

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Spam Report 5: Case Study profiling Tongue Tied (Manchester) Ltd

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The incidents of receiving unsolicited emails are increasing exponentially. I don’t know about you, but I definitely didn't have this many spam emails during the Covid-19 Lockdowns and I can confirm that it started to increase ever since we got back to a "new normal". I suspect that my email address has been collected from a business database and boom, many companies who are desperate for work are starting their spamming practice towards me! and some of you too?

In my world it is totally unacceptable that Richard emails me without having had any dealings with me previously, it is a clear example of what I call spray and pray. Spray your begging letter far and wide and Pray that someone will pick up on it. We’ve all been guilty of doing it, I can confirm I am definitely guilty of it, but I stopped it and will never send a marketing email to people I have had no dealings with ever again. The question has to be, why would you?

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Spam Report 3: Case Study profiling ABL Business Ltd

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Email received on 17 September, 2021 from Andy Redman, ABL Business Ltd. The individual or company is not known to me, I have never had any dealings with them, have never communicated with them or connected with them on Social Media.

Firstly the email he used to send to me isn't even my own company email. I do some freelancing for a drumming music teacher and in order to formalise communication with outside organisations I was given a company email address by the teacher. I hardly use this email and it's not in the public domain on many websites, although recently I did add this email to a Birmingham website.

Upon further investigation, I realised this was indeed a legitimate organisation and Andy Redman is real, I discovered their website and saw his name on LinkedIn too. Then I looked into the links at the bottom of the email, in particular the privacy statement. I then realised the privacy statement layout and information was exactly the same as two previous unsolicited emails I had received the previous day by Ideal Lighting and Print by Splash.

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Spam Report 2: Case Study profiling BairesDev

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As part of my journey uncovering email spammers, I have started publishing some of my results on LinkedIn and tagging individuals in organisations, especially the senior leaders. This strategy is definitely starting to have some impact. In the past two incidents I have received responses from the organisations involved, either by the person who has been tagged or someone who works in the organisation.

Dialogue is good, it means they are taking the exposure seriously. I’m not sure everyone knows that LinkedIn has a super powerful search engine and therefore the possibility of negative press and exposure is a very real possibility. At least I am discovering a positive method for using LinkedIn, instead of just posting adverts about what I am doing and promoting my business, which is basically how most use LinkedIn, that and of course the personal Facebook-like posts that are appearing all over these days.

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Spam Report 1: A journey into the dark web!

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They have finally have gotten to me, after years of being a prolific emailer and trying to circumnavigate the daily spammers, I have decided to take action. You could call it ‘war on spammers’ or ‘counterspammerism’, I’m going after them in a small way but even in a few short weeks I have been able to grow my knowledge about the ways that I can start making some impact.

This is the first of what will be several reports on my progress in an effort to share some insights, which others may wish to investigate themselves.

Just to set the scene. My computer is an Apple Mac, but because it’s 8 years old I’m on Catalina. I use Apple Mail on my Mac and my iOS devices, but the bulk of the heavy lifting of course will have to be done on the Mac as on iOS as far as I can see you can’t even interrogate the email header. Seeing as the email header is where the majority of the research takes place then all the work will have to be done on the Mac.