SouthernLady wrote: I received an email from a marketing group about a client who wants to advertise on my page, and I will be paid via PayPal if I agree to the terms.
I'm pretty sure that same email went to thousands or maybe hundreds of thousands of others. My best suggestion is to ignore emails from people you don't know. don't open them and certainly don't click on the links within them often they lead to malicious websites that will install spyware without you being aware or consenting to it.
also never do business dealings with anyone or offer any personal information on the internet that didn't provide an address and name that you can verify the location of by other means. if I'm searching to buy stuff I will always click on contacts and if they don't have a phone number to call on the website and a brick an mortar adress I can verify on google maps I don't buy from them. If you have a problem and they aren't easy to contact then thats suspicious. If you call ask some specific questions that no one would know other than if they actually worked in that trade.
for that email , if you did want to respond you could just ask a whole bunch of questions and if they were legitamate yould expect they would take the time to answer them all to your satisfaction. When I was thinking of bidding on anythign on ebay I would always send thre seller some questionms and see how he answered them. if I wasn't satisfied with the sellers communication skills then I wouldn't make bid.
If you see a website selling a product you want. never pay before you take the effort to google their business location and actually see where the location is and call them. If they don't have a website with a phone number dont' buy from them.
its very easy to open a website and copy another website's code to it the result is an identical website in every respect but maybe one letter in the web address. You are usually safer to not go to the link relieved in email but to search for it.. If you want to buy from amazon you probably don't have to call them, they are a big company so if you google amazon dot com and go to the link in google you are probably on the right website and not an identical copy of the amazon website.
usually emails like this are sent by bots. If you reply a real human may be receiving them and looking for signs that you bought in to their scam by replying. they will then enguage with emails etc.
the fact they want to pay by paypal is another sign that they want to do a transaction with you without you having any idea of their whereabouts.
If a scammer gets you to make a legitimate transaction with your credit card and then subsequently scams you the credit card company won't protect you so well because you have already had transactions with them so be careful of even the smallest amount. they may do that for good reason. I had a friend who bought into a scam for a very small amount and then they started calling him and charging his visa for each call. He had a terrible time stopping it.
I'ts easy to generate invoices from paypal to anyone. . I once sent a buddy of mine an invoice for a million dollars as a joke. I knew him very well and it was such a large amount it couldn't be construed as a scam but it would be easy to do something more sinister using the site. Scammers love money transfer websites like western union too.
one easy way to check for scams is to enter some of the keywords from their email into Google. you can put a phrase in quotes. or Google their business name. If you Google the name of most legitimate businesses you'll probably find some evidence of whether or not they are legit other than their website. If Im buying car parts from company X thren I;d expect to see their name mentioned on other car related forums and such. Little evidence of others using the company should set of the alarms that maybe they don't really exist.
I knew a girl who fell hook line and sinker for a company that called "from microsoft" saying she had a virus and was spreading it. these scammers send thousands of emails or phone calls and out of that get a small percentage of people who fall prey it and they can be extremely crafty at manipulating people by email or by phone. Once they have you on the hook IE you are responding to them, then they will often put in lots of time to land your money in your pockets. One way is to threaten you , another is to offer you a carrot.
Email phishing is very common, they will often send many emails to large companies or indiividuals and try to ask you to reset your pin or say your account has been compromised or something to make you worry and react. Never click the links in these emails.
Dating sites are full of scammers because it is a way to engage with people you don't know and to get people sharing personal information. Most often they will not have perfect English and they try to lead people to believe they are interested and then when they get them there they try to extort money, for example airfare to come see you.
when I was single and on a dating site I would often play along by responding through the site just for fun and it was surprising how long they would engage before finally giving up. the easiest way to pick them out was to ask a trivial question about my own home town that anyone would know but a foreigner wouldn't.
If you use your credit card online its good to change your visa number once in a while. Usually i prepare by taking a little cash out and just call and say Im not suspicious that my card is stolen but I noticed it isn't in my wallet now and they will immediately cancel it send out a new card with a fresh number within days. the old card number is no longer beneficial. If you never do that then anyone could obtain your number from a transaction even years earlier and use it.
I see many people sharing personal info on sites like facebook. for examle I have a friend that will show off his whole collection of valuables at one time and then report in from mexico on holiday. well obviously he's not home and it's pretty likely his collection is a great place for a break in.
If you take pictures with your iphone and have location services turned on then your exact location and time gets imbedded within the photo's coding. Oops you thought you didn't share your personal address on the internet? well it's easy to just by posting a photo. Experts can find out where and when you took those photos so never take pictures with location services turned on.
Face recognition software also gives a lot of data. Its easy to take a face picture and find other photos of you that are also on the internet. That's creepy. they dont' even need your name to find all kinds of info about you including your name, phone number and exact address.
one tactic is to be very guarded about what info you put out there. There are many companies collecting data for direct marketing but many are unscrupulous. If Im buying somethign in a store they dont' need my email and if they ask for it I just say you don't need that. Many stores also offer discount cards and they then have a record of every time you shopped there, what you bought, when you bought it. You share a lot of personal info in doing this. I have one for my local grocery store for bob smith. It works just as well and I even do get my bonus points. The grocery store doesn't need my personal info.
If people contact you by phone or email that don't know you then don't' buy from them ever. Thats my policy. If I want my carpets cleaned I can choose who cleans my carpets I don't' need some stranger calling me up to do that. I usually just state that I will never deal with any company that uses phone soliciting for advertising and that I have added them to my internet boycott list and please take my number off your list.
Sometimes if I have nothing better to do I let them waste as much time as I can get them to and try to engage in conversations like gee it isn't really cool to be calling up strangers and disturbing them. How much do they pay you for that. If they engage I try to help them find another job by telling them what they are doing isn't cool and they can probably make as much or more doing something else, maybe even try to help them find better employment. Oh my buddy gust got on at company X and I thinmk they want to hire more people you should try there.. I usually try not to be rude as I do want them to take me off the list .
the fact that you were approached by email by someone you don't know should set off similar alarm bells. If you wanted to try to get money from an ad on a website I'm sure you could do some research and find a legitimate one.
it's pretty likely that your email software has a feature where you can block the sender and delete the email. If you dont' know who they are and it looks fishy don't give it a moment's thought.
There are some really smart scammers that are crafty at accumulating data about people and there are a lot of people who share a lot on the internet. Its not that hard to get a bit here and a bit there and put it together and to do that on a massive scale and the result can be someone scamming your credit card or worse, assuming your online identity. That someone could likely be in Russia or somewhere you'd have a really hard time prosecuting. There are many people who are living in depressed areas who are very internet savvy and very crafty at what they do for a profession and just ready to take you for a ride so be careful .
credit card scams are really common. the credit card companies won't try to publicize the risks and will often pay out. they make a lot of money and this is part of their cost of business. always check your statement and not just the large purchases. look for any company you don't recognize and find out where they are. Often they will take small amounts at least at first.
i was looking for a van and found one at a reasonable price. he wanted to meet me in the grocery store parking lot. ok that set some alarms off but I was curious so I went to see it. It was a good price but it absolutely wreaked of gasoline. It had rubber matts in the back and they were all curled up even. He had an open gas can in the cab I guess to try to make me think thats where the smell was coming from.
then I noticed the van had two gas caps, but only one tank. and I remembered hearing about a recent scam that these guys were going to the gas station and filling up with credit cards that had been scammed. they would filll up a huge tank in the back of the van, then it wasn't too hard to find people to buy gas at half price on the black market.
i decided I didn't need the van lol
the point is all those credit cards, all that money was turning up on peoples credit card and all they had done was gone to some little store that was scamming the data from their cards.
now they can scan your card without even removing it from your wallet. Its getting more and more creepy as time goes on. some people keep their credit cards in foil pouches to prevent this.
If you have an iphone and keep your location services on and go walking through a major mall they have the technology to track your every footstep. they then know how much time you spent , what you looked at. how long it took you to decide, that's a little more than I knew I was sharing so I keep my location services turned off.
one common way to get personal passcodes and such is to set up a website where you have to verify. then, when people can't log in they start thinking well maybe it's this passcode I used , or that one. before long they have every passcode in your head. Its good practice to keep different levels. If you do use a common passcode for different sites you can aleways add a number or perhaps the first letter of their website as the last digit. guard the ones for your bank account and your pin numbers and such. never use those ones for other things.
Phil
