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Posted (edited)

I've recently received emails purportedly from two reputable companies I have a relationship with offering a free gift as some sort of loyalty reward (NRMA - emergency first aid kit, Woolworths - Tupperware collection).

 

Both of these approaches appear to be scams (and not from the companies), intending to collect personal information including credit card details.

 

Has anyone else had these emails, and others of a similar type?

 

 

Edited by Bronal
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Posted

Hi Alan, happy new year. Yes to your question, I get them all the time, always with email addresses from other countries and just harvesting data as you suggest. You just need to stay alert. Nick

Posted

As I said in my initial post, I have a relationship with both the NRMA (member and insurance)  and Woolworths (online shopping), so the scammers have obviously got hold of my email address through this, which is rather disturbing.

Posted

This is why I never sign up as a member to stores for their discounts.  Just not worth it.  I did it a few years ago at Supercheap Auto.  They were selling some oil at a great price, but wait, I had to be a member to get the price, so I signed up.  By the time I got home my email spam box was choccas.

 

Lesson learnt.

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Posted
23 hours ago, Bronal said:

As I said in my initial post, I have a relationship with both the NRMA (member and insurance)  and Woolworths (online shopping), so the scammers have obviously got hold of my email address through this, which is rather disturbing.

I am not a member of NRMA, nor Woolworths, nor about another 10-20 other online retailers that I get 'gifts' from. So they didn't harvest my email from those sites, and it's unlikely they grabbed them from the the sites I am a member of. Your email will be lying around in a number of places on the internet and it's simple been harvested at some point and put on a list.

 

I just naturally assume that any offer of anything free is a scam (and my junk filter agrees - they all end up in there before I get to look at them). I always 'report' them via the button on the top of my email browser in the hopes that they will eventually be removed...but often the email address of the sender is just a semi-random series of letters/numbers.

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Posted (edited)
17 minutes ago, Cloth Ears said:

often the email address of the sender is just a semi-random series of letters/numbers.

 

Very true and a good tell-tale sign of a scam.  However, I got hit last year by an email that came from my mate with his correct email address.  The email was brief which was slightly odd but nothing to raise alarm bells.  It mentioned me to click on a link with something he was in to, which I did because it came from a trusted source.  The next day my bank accounts were cleaned out.  In the end his email account had been hacked and fake emails were sent from his legitimate email address.  Just something to be mindful of.  The only way around this scam is to call or text the sender asking if it was they who sent it. 

Edited by Kaynin
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Posted
20 minutes ago, Kaynin said:

 

Very true and a good tell-tale sign of a scam.  However, I got hit last year by an email that came from my mate with his correct email address.  The email was brief which was slightly odd but nothing to raise alarm bells.  It mentioned me to click on a link with something he was in to, which I did because it came from a trusted source.  The next day my bank accounts were cleaned out.  In the end his email account had been hacked and fake emails were sent from his legitimate email address.  Just something to be mindful of.  The only way around this scam is to call or text the sender asking if it was they who sent it. 

Luckily, we get tested by this sort of thing on a weekly basis - I have three different businesses I have emails accounts with for work. And they are always sending out test emails to make sure we aren't going to fall fro the latest scams.

And I occasionally get ones from other sources, like the one from my mum asking for Apple cards for some reason. I have no idea if the bum had hacked mum's email or not, but I did send him/her/they back a succinctly worded email about what I would do with his arms and other orifices of his body - if he didn't quietly go off and do his stuff with someone who wasn't dying of MND. Never heard from them again.

My only real time was when I had ebay set-up to auto-pay (mid-naughties) and someone managed to grab around $1200 before I noticed (lucky I logged in when I did). Got all the money back from the MasterCard in a couple of days and from the bank in a couple of weeks.

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  • 4 weeks later...
Posted

In the old days when scammers would ring the landline, if I had time to kill I would often tie them up for a long time so they wouldn't be making calls to other people, as a passive-aggressive response.  I later heard that because the scammers are often backed by organised crime, they could be quite vindictive if you are abusive to them - they do have some of your personal details, and you don't want them searching for more, or making your number available for more scammers to call.  So now I don't abuse them or antagonise them when they call, I will say it sounds like a scam and hangup. 

 

I do enjoy watching some of the IT guys in the "scam the scammer" videos in youtube, where they hack into the scammer's network, get a lot of information and reverse a lot of the scammed money back into the victim's accounts. 

 

And I think governments throughout the world need to put pressure on governments of countries where scammers are protected.  There have been times when our government has (rightly) substantially contributed to natural disaster relief funds in some of those countries - I would make the donations contingent on them having a commitment to shutting down scammers who target our country. 

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