The internet is awash with scams. Every batch of emails brings new spam, phishing scams, etc. I don’t very often read them these days because my external spam filters exclude most of them and my internal spam filters catch most of the rest.

Scam 1:

I only noticed one purporting to come from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, the British equivalent of the US’s Internal Revenue Service, because (although it went straight into my spam folder) it happened to flash up on the screen - my spam filter uses Growl notification. It was a typically unsophisticated effort, although I won’t go into all the give-aways as I don’t want to help them improve their scam! The text of the message said: ‘You have 1 new ALERT message. Please login to your Online Account and go to Messages section in order to read the message. To Login, please click the link below: Online Account Login’. I was pretty sure it was a scam but an examination of the link showed that it took you to http://bordnet.net/www.hmrc.gov.uk/index.html. I have reported this to HMRC and the ISP which hosts the dodgy site.

Scam 2:

This one wasn’t picked up by my spam filters, but it will be next time! It purported to be from Drago Store Pty in Australia. Again, I won’t discuss the many clues which indicated that it was fraudulent, although I will say that I treat all emails from gmail addresses as suspect. As far as I can see, Google don’t have any proper abuse-reporting procedure. Gmail is certainly every fraudster’s favourite email service. The message read: ‘Greetings from Drago Store Pty. My name is Douglas Patti the CEO of the company. i will like to place order on some products in your company,but i would like to know if you ship to Australia and also do you accept Visa or Master card as method of payment? Please do not forget to include your web page in your replying back to my message and get back to me as fast as possible so that i can let you know the product i would like to order. Please email me back with the current price list on the products if you website is not updated. Thank you.... Yours Sincerely, Douglas Patti.’

I googled one or two items in the message and immediately found this site reporting a scam related to a similar email.