Are You in the 51 Percent Club? - Comments Page 2

Sometimes, the opposite is the case:
I often receive email that my own checking later determines was truly sent by the company it purports to be from but that I had initially suspected was spam (or worse). This is because the sender's address, or the link in the email, contained nothing remotely resembling the name of the company. It often has the brief name (or acronym) of some intermediary marketing service (which may include buzzwords like "Click" or "Track") followed by a very long strung of random-looking characters. Legitimate companies surely want us to trust the sender and respond to their email, right? So why do they out-source the handling of their online correspondence to cryptically-named middlemen who neglect to construct their email addresses (and especially their URL inks) in a way that reflects the fact that they truly are related to their client? If they did, the cautious recipient of the email would then need to check only that the URL really does point to the destination it appears to (in the status bar as you hover your mouse pointer over over the link).

One warning for those who may not know:
In any URL, the “real” site is revealed by what comes between the second-to-last dot and the first single slash (or the end if there is none). A URL always begins with the part that says https:// (and then maybe www.) But if it then goes on to show something like "microsoft.login.com.x.com", it will not take you to any Microsoft site. It will go instead to x.com!

Likewise, if you see the following in the URL:

citibank.com.login.promo.scammer.ru/fake_but_real-looking_citibank_page.htm

...then clicking that link will load this page:

scammer.ru/fake_but_real-looking_citibank_page.htm

Any amount of additional text or random-looking strings can be inserted anywhere by the scammer to distract you (or to hide the revealing part of the URL by making it run off your screen and get truncated).

More details here:
https://www.digitalcheck.com/how-to-spot-phishing-scams/

PC Matic and Google mail seem to handle all the weird and wonderful spam that is sent my way.

Do people still believe that they are being contacted by an African princess who needs them to help her send millions of dollars out of the country.

We get far more bogus telephone calls these days than emails. We have phone numbers in the UK and USA and over 90% of them are American. It is something that needs to hbe dealt with.

There are pretty odd results - I recently had a legitimate phone call from my doctor's surgery and was more than a little abrupt with the caller - luckily she had also been suffering from bogus calls and we had a good laugh at the situation.

Can I add that even if the call is from a legitikate supplier there can be problems when giving card information. We had £6500 extracted from two cards by an ASDA (Walmart) employee a few years ago and had to be (eventually) compensated by our bank and credit card company. After many years we still await the courtessy of an email or returned telephone call from ASDA.

Be careful, it's better to appear over cautipous than skint.