Beware the scams. The price of safety is eternal vigilance.

February 29, 2024

By Peter Bowditch

Scams and conmen have probably existed since the  invention of writing. At one time the major export industry for Nigeria was sending out letters saying that some billionaire wanted to give some money away, and all you had to do was send a few dollars to start the process. In 2000 a spokesperson for the US Postal Service told me that as the letters used fake stamps there was no need to deliver them and the USPO was pulping about a tonne of the letters every month. For a short while the "letters" arrived by fax, which presumably cost less than the envelopes used before. In 2001 the scam moved to the Internet, and I got my first Nigerian Email in 2001. In April 2003 I warned the clients of my IT consulting business about phishing (although the word hadn't been invented then). I'd received an email purporting to be from PayPal asking me to provide credit card details (including PIN). In 2004 I was at a conference where two actors performed a hilarious version of leading a scammer on.

So there's nothing new happening today, but while I used to get a Nigerian letter only once every couple of weeks, now scams seem to arrive on a daily (hourly?) basis. Just today a hacked Facebook account asked me to provide a code to access Facebook. I knew the account was hacked because the real person had advised as many people as possible, with a warning not to interact with the fake account. Had I proceeded the scammer would have complete access to my Facebook account.

Some scams can be quite sophisticated, and it is sometimes easy to get caught.

Yesterday I received a very well presented letter coming from a company offering to renew the registration of the business name "Oberon Matters". It looked like quite a bargain, especially the three year discount.

But what does the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) have to say about prices. ASIC is the actual registrar of the names.

Sometimes the scam is hidden. Nobody should be unaware by now that price comparison sites receive commissions on sales, so the recommendations could possibly be influenced by the commission rate. (Also, the fact that a large number of travel comparison sites share a common owner is well hidden.) The NSW government provides a free web site to compare the prices of the compulsory third party insurance that is required to register a car. Another site looks very much like the government site (it has .com instead of .gov in the address) but scrapes the data from the government site and receives a commission on any sales made.

So what can you do to avoid being scammed?

• Your bank, credit union, PayPal, insurance company or other financial institution will never send an email containing a link to anywhere. If you see a link, it's a scam. Don't click on it.
• If the Australian Tax Office, Centrelink or any other federal government department wants you to read a letter you will get an email telling you to log into your MyGov account to read it. There will be no links in the email sent to you.
• Australia Post might send you text messages saying that parcels from Ebay or Amazon are coming today. There will be no link in the text. If the parcel can't be delivered they will leave a card in your letterbox, they will not ask you to go to a web site.
• You are not going to get massively rich because a Facebook post tells you that Elon Musk/Bill Gates/... has found the cryptocurrency that will produce even better results than speculating with tulips in the 17th century.
• Even in emails or messages that appear to come from friends, never click on a link unless you can be absolutely sure it's safe.
• Get a good password manager. I use LastPass but there are many others. Don't reuse passwords on multiple sites and change the important ones regularly, particularly on sites which are scamsters' targets like Facebook.
• Don't rely on your email provider for spam detection. (I have four email addresses. One of them is now suffering from the host organisation introducing an extremely aggressive spam filter, which means I have to log into a web interface to the server on a regular basis to see what might have been blocked. Some messages are placed in "quarantine" and I can release them; some just disappear without trace and I have no way of knowing about them. I have asked for this to be turned off, but haven't received an answer.) Occasionally check the "junk" folder in Outlook or Gmail and get some surprises. I use a program called Mailwasher that filters out suspicious emails before they get downloaded from the server and I haven't had any spam reach my inbox for a very long time. (Note that I don't get any money for recommending LastPass or Mailwasher. You pay them, not me.)
• If some spam gets through, never respond, not even to say "Stop sending this". A reply tags your email address as real and means it can be sold on to other scammers.
• Remember the immortal proverb: "If it sounds too good to be true it probably is".
• Or as Shakespeare reminded us in All's Well That Ends Well - "Love all, trust a few".

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