Are There Any 'SCAMMING' Experts out there ???

[rodhudson]

This whole ‘scamming’ thing seems to be getting worse and worse. I’m not an ‘alarmist’, and feel I can spot them quite easily.

But recently I have had 5 quite long ones, from no Address, suggesting that they have hacked into my PC and obtained all my Addresses, and some ‘deviant Videos’ [there are none !!], and unless I pay $1500 in BITCOIN to some 50 character long string of numbers and characters, they will send these photos to friends and family on my address list !

Now all these emails contain the exact same wording, although the Bitcoin addresses are all different, and the single name in the FROM field is different in each case. They all state that they know my Password for these is ‘honeypie’, which I have never even heard of !

Furthermore, they say they have implanted a Pixel to know when I have responded or not, and I have 5 days to pay!

My view is that they are sending out millions of these things in the hope that someone will panic into paying up, and that they are trading on people’s ignorance as to what is technically possible or not !

But where will it all end ? Definitely getting worse !!

[tanstaafl]

Its not going to end as long as its dirt cheap to send email. They can make money with ridiculously poor response rates. However, if you choose a email provider that does a good job of detecting spam (scams are usually treated as a type of spam) such as gmail or fastmail they will block you from seeing most of that. I don't think I've ever gotten a spam message in my gmail inbox. If you have multiple accounts think about configuring gmail (via webmail settings) to automatically fetch mail from POP servers and merge it into the Gmail inbox. That way you take advantage of Gmail's spam detection. You can configure a column in Thunderbird to identify what account the message was for.

Thunderbird by default disables loading remote images. That's why you get yellow "To protect your privacy Thunderbird has blocked remote content in this message" alerts at the top of a message. You could also default to viewing messages as plain text using view -> message body as -> plain text and add a button to your toolbar to toggle between viewing it as plain text and HTML.

https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/th ... mp/?src=ss

[rodhudson]

I accept totally what you have said. And to be fair, these 'scams' have only ever reached my 'JUNK' box, which I do check before trashing them, as I have had some 'proper' emails ending up there !

I am more concerned by the fact that these 'Scamming-Type' Emails seem to be 'undetectable', which is a sure-fire recipe for them to grow and grow.
Surely if they can accept a BITCOIN Payment there must be some way to detect the perpetrators ?

[tanstaafl]

You could create a message filter that detects whether a message contains any mention of bitcoins, and automatically delete the message if that is true AND the sender wasn't in your address book. However, your problem seems more like you're having too many false positives when detecting junk.

Does your email provider use something like SpamAssassin that you could tell the junk mail controls to trust? SpamAssassin normally adds some headers that contain useful things such as a spam score and what country it was sent from. If not I suggest you consider installing SpamPal (which uses DNS black listing) and configure the junk mail controls to trust its judgement. See http://kb.mozillazine.org/Junk_Mail_Con ... nd_SpamPal . I suggest you also look at the training and tweaking sections in that KB article.

[rodhudson]

OK. Thanks for those tips.
None of it particularly worries me. And I do have a 'SCAM' folder where I save all of these things to, in case it may be useful one day !

I just find it odd that these messages with no name of sender, which seem untraceable, can get delivered anyway. I would have thought it an easy step to just refuse to progress anything without a valid 'FROM ADDRESS' at source.

[tanstaafl]

The smtp protocol doesn't impose any requirements on the From: address being real/valid. Use view -> message source or Control-U and look at the Received: headers. They will identify the original smtp server and each smtp server that passed the message on. While its possible to add a additional bogus received: header I don't think you can prevent the smtp server that you use from automatically adding a real received: header.

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-tr ... he-source/

[rodhudson]

Thanks. I will look at what you have suggested, although with very little hope of actually progressing anything.
As these Scams say, 'trying to track us will be a waste of time, as we have covered our tracks completely !'

But I would like to draw a distinction between 'SPAMMING' and 'SCAMMING'.
The former are just time wasters. These Scammers are indulging in a illegal, criminal activity and trying to trying to make a lot of money using 'Extortion by Blackmail'.

So I do find it somewhat disappointing that the 'Authorities' that seem to control the cogs in the Emailing wheel take such a relaxed attitude to it all.

And it is, of course, the ease with which it can be done at no cost that makes it a viable option for the crooks.