Anyone Getting "Realistic" Fake Emails?

[kyphysics]

I'm not sure how to word this, so please forgive the title of the thread if it's not the best description.

So...over the last year or so, I've gotten emails that seemed legitimate, but that had something odd/suspicious about them and caused me not to open them. For example, I've gotten an email with "INVOICE" as the sender and then a receipt number in the title.

Another example is getting an email from a known company I've done business with, but having the email come out of the blue and have a weird title (it mentioned a renewal certificate). I actually called that company and they said they wouldn't have sent that and have never heard of the person whose name was listed as the sender.

I change my email passwords regularly, so I doubt someone has hacked my email account and is trying to send me fakes with the intention of getting me to open up some attachment that sends crazy malware or something like that. But, I just find these clever and disturbing. I was close to opening this one described above, but my gut sensed something was wrong. I called and am glad they said it wasn't them who sent it.

I guess my question is how on Earth would someone know to send such an email from someone I'd done business with in the past? Anyone get such "deep fake" emails? If so, how common have you found it to be?

 

[DrClaude]

They send such e-mails to everyone. I've gotten lots of them from companies that I never have done business with (they seem to be often targeting Americans). They just need a couple to land in the right inboxes.

A good tip is to check if the e-mail is personalized. When I get e-mails from, e.g., Amazon or PayPal, they always know my real name.

Also, always check where the e-mail is really coming from. Sometimes, it is obvious,

sometimes, you have to look at the message headers to know exactly where the message come from.

A lot could be said about not clicking links in e-mails. I have even noticed that many legitimate e-mails no longer contain links. They simply tell you to go to the company's website.

 

[jedishrfu]

Best email practices of today’s companies and government organizations is to not provide a directly clickable link but instead direct the user to their site. Clickable links have two parts, the link address and some display text. Often the display text is either the company name or.it’s url.

However, bad actors may instead make the display text say one thing but the url to say something entirely different fooling the recipient. Now they suggest you type in the url and forego the convenience of a link.

Sadly, some companies haven’t gotten the best practices message and their emails look suspicious and should be rightly avoided by the end user. At work we routinely get valid yet suspicious messages that we question and have to verify before we can act. Some parts of our university have yet to adopt best practices.

An enduser best practice is to set your mail client to not render html in messages so you can look at where links really go and thus be less likely fooled by questionable links.

 

[MikeeMiracle]

That e-mail from the company you had done business with, all i takes is a little malware on one of the corporate machines and then they can access that company's e-mail server. From there its easy to find out who they have been receiving e-mails from and sending them to in order to make an e-mail seem more legitimate.

This is quite often these days, be vigilant to the e-mails themselves, not who they came from. Don't let it freak you out :)

 

[Janus]

Just recently my wife got an email claiming to be our bank. It said that they had stopped a charge to her credit card and asked if it was a valid charge or not.
It immediately set off alarm bells. For one, she had signed up for text alerts, and had not received one on her phone, For another the Red and Green boxes that you were supposed to click for "yes" or "no" had some extra wording in them that I hadn't seen before ( we got an alert once on a valid charge which the bank thought might be iffy).
So we just logged on to our bank account the normal way, checked for alerts, and found none. We forwarded the E-mail to our bank's fraud department.
A few days later my wife got a notice from a company she had bought some stuff from that there had been a data breach, and some info had been leaked. Nothing vital, e-mail addresses, etc. It turned out this happened on the same day as she got the e-mail. So obviously it was an attempt to phish for more information.

 

[kyphysics]

Here's another example:

Paypal said I donated money to someone and gave me a receipt. I was like WHAT?? I opened that email and it was not anyone I knew (donor). I then opened my Paypal and my latest transactions had no such record. That was the only fake email I've opened (no link in the email itself...it was all text). Hope I didn't get malware from it.

But, yeah, these are actually kind of "decent" fakes. They make you curious. I was dumb to open the Paypal fake email, but thankfully I've resisted all others thus far.

 

[anorlunda]

It is called "spear pfishing" It uses your personal information, such as the names of coworkers, or your wife's favorite item, or what your recent purchases were, to seed phony emails to make them appear real to you.

That is one of the reasons why you should try to protect your information online or on your devices. Random true facts about you can be used as a weapon against you. Protecting yourself becomes more difficult every year.

 

[DrClaude]

It uses your personal information, such as the names of coworkers, or your wife's favorite item, or what your recent purchases were, to seed phony emails to make them appear real to you.

I don't think that what @kyphysics got is that sophisticated. I know that I never got something like that. The e-mails usually do not contain any specific information.

 

[StevieTNZ]

Just look at the email address the sender is using. If its hotmail instead of .anz.co.nz (for example - a bank website), then delete it.

 

[MikeeMiracle]

The sending address is extremely easily faked, I can knock up an e-mail to appear to come from any address I like in about 30 seconds...by all means check it but don't rely on it.

 

[DrClaude]

The sending address is extremely easily faked, I can knock up an e-mail to appear to come from any address I like in about 30 seconds...by all means check it but don't rely on it.

Yes. That's why I said that one should check the headers to see where the mail really came from.

 

[MikeeMiracle]

Checking message headers is a better method but you do need some tech knowledge to decipher them. If your not an IT Tech the message headers are just gibberish.

 

[Rive]

Anyone get such "deep fake" emails? If so, how common have you found it to be?

Once I got one such email to company mail with company profile matching, referenced to existing people with matching profession and many details.

It could have been a valid RFQ, but the return address was soooooo fake that it was discarded without much bother.

 

[Stephen Tashi]

Before opening email, it's best to disconnect your computer from the internet to keep scammers from knowing that you have opened their messages. Otherwise they can deduce the type of message titles that attract your attention. ( Only setting the computer not to open images in emails isn't sufficient. And I don't know if Thunderbird email's option to "block remote content" is sufficient.)

For example, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_beacon

However, since beacons can be embedded in email as non-pictorial elements, the email need not contain an image or advertisement or anything else related to the identity of the monitoring party. This makes detection of such emails difficult.[7]

 

[kyphysics]

Dumb Question:
How do you see the sender address w/o opening the email? I get you can see the sender "title," but that's not the same as their email address.

edited to add: For example, I might see something is sent from "Charles Lawn Care" and see the email title as "Receipt of service." But, unless I open the email in my Gmail account, how can I see the way the sender's email is written?

 

[MikeeMiracle]

If your looking at e-mail through a web page like the gmail website its unlikely you will get infected as your just being sent web page data. It's really a main problem if you have a dedicated e-mail client like Outlook and actually download e-mail onto your PC before opening it.

 

[gmax137]

I get emails like this from time to time on my work laptop. They come from our IT group as a test to see if we are smart enough to forward the email on to the "suspicious emails" folder. If we do we get a congrats and if we open the email and click its links we get a scolding.

 

[MikeeMiracle]

That's pretty standard these days, companies testing their employees for alertness. I have been in a company where if you misclick the test e-mails 3 times you get sacked.

 

[gmax137]

if you misclick the test e-mails 3 times you get sacked

wow that's pretty severe. on the other hand, an employee that doesn't get it and continues clicking away like that is probably screwing around or making mistakes in other areas.

 

[MikeeMiracle]

Well, in my case I was working somewhere sensitive that required national security clearence. Severe...yes...but necesary in that environment.

 

[Mark44]

I've been getting a lot of scammer PayPal emails lately. If the sender's email seems flaky, I mark them as junk.

 

[davenn]

So...over the last year or so, I've gotten emails that seemed legitimate, but that had something odd/suspicious about them and caused me not to open them. For example, I've gotten an email with "INVOICE" as the sender and then a receipt number in the title.

Another example is getting an email from a known company I've done business with, but having the email come out of the blue and have a weird title (it mentioned a renewal certificate). I actually called that company and they said they wouldn't have sent that and have never heard of the person whose name was listed as the sender.

I get 1000's of them a year purporting to be from companies I do and don't deal with
Banks, Internet Providers, The classic PAYPAL one that @DrClaude displayed

Phishing emails have been around for years and years. Their "quality" are getting better
as their replication of the invoice etc page gets more and more like an original and even with a reasonable glance
it is difficult to tell them apart.

Dumb Question:
How do you see the sender address w/o opening the email? I get you can see the sender "title," but that's not the same as their email address.

That's easy ( well maybe depending on your email client) my very, very old one Eudora shows the addy in the status bar at the bottom of the screen when I move the mouse over the "reply" "click here to update info" etc words Dave

 

[davenn]

I guess my question is how on Earth would someone know to send such an email from someone I'd done business with in the past? Anyone get such "deep fake" emails? If so, how common have you found it to be?

Again very easy ... these phishing people are continuously scanning the net picking up your and the business email addy's
then altering them and sending you the fake emails

 

[davenn]

here's a typical example
purporting to be from Woolworths ( a major Australian supermarket chain)

Note: when I hover the mouse over any of the parts in the email look at the addy in the lower left corner
it has nothing to do with a link to Woolworths
Sometimes the company name will appear in the addy, but rarely will it be early on, before the first "/"

 

[Janus]

here's a typical example
purporting to be from Woolworths ( a major Australian supermarket chain)

Obviously a different Woolworths than the five and dime that used to exist in the US.

 

[diogenesNY]

My regular personal account gets the usual spam &c, but recently at work (which has a necessarily very secure enterprise level email and contact administration system) we have been experiencing an epidemic of some fairly well constructed fakes. These have included a somewhat realistic notice supposedly (but not really) from our email administrator whitch itself contained a warning about fake emails - along with a blind link, as well as somewhat authentic looking (but not if you looked it over carefully) email supposedly from a work related regulatory body... Regulatory body letters have the ability to kind of freak out the recipients when we receive them, even if they are fairly innocuous (and if you work in a regulated industry, you know what I mean), and while I am never likely to click on a blind link, it is the kind of thing that can catch one off guard. I had to call up a colleague to insure and confirm that he had not clicked the link (he had not). Home office has even sent out a series of warnings which themselves left me momentarily suspicious, until I looked them over... they had no links in any case, but I can see how some people might have been caught off guard.

Cause for concern and increased vigilance.

--diogenesNY

 

[kyphysics]

ANYONE I THE ONLY ONE GETTING SPAMMED ELECTION EMAILS?

So, I donated to a political campaign in the U.S. primaries. Since then, I've gotten 10 trillion or so emails from candidates I DID NOT donate too, but who are of the same party.

One email early on said they got my email from the original campaign I donated to and wanted to ask for my help. ...Uhhhhhhhhhhh, I did not consent. Now, it's been never-ending emails from a ton of people asking for help. As soon as I unsubscribe from one, another new email address sender gets through.

*sorry for the vent*

 

[Janus]

ANYONE I THE ONLY ONE GETTING SPAMMED ELECTION EMAILS?

So, I donated to a political campaign in the U.S. primaries. Since then, I've gotten 10 trillion or so emails from candidates I DID NOT donate too, but who are of the same party.

One email early on said they got my email from the original campaign I donated to and wanted to ask for my help. ...Uhhhhhhhhhhh, I did not consent. Now, it's been never-ending emails from a ton of people asking for help. As soon as I unsubscribe from one, another new email address sender gets through.

*sorry for the vent*

My wife has the same problem with texts on her phone. She gets a political text message, blocks the number, gets another text, blocks that number...

 

[Tom.G]

For those in the US, the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) is the one that enforces the law about unsolicited [edit] commercial [/edit] calls to cell phones.

If I recall correctly, the penalty is $1000 per call made. Made kind'a expensive because the cell phone user is charged for their connect time.

 

[kyphysics]

My wife has the same problem with texts on her phone. She gets a political text message, blocks the number, gets another text, blocks that number...

Hopefully this changes post-election...even if just seeing a decrease in spam volume. I have a feeling I'll still get some emails every now and then until mid-terms (when it might ramp up again).

Very annoying!

 

[jake jot]

I'm not sure how to word this, so please forgive the title of the thread if it's not the best description.

So...over the last year or so, I've gotten emails that seemed legitimate, but that had something odd/suspicious about them and caused me not to open them. For example, I've gotten an email with "INVOICE" as the sender and then a receipt number in the title.

Another example is getting an email from a known company I've done business with, but having the email come out of the blue and have a weird title (it mentioned a renewal certificate). I actually called that company and they said they wouldn't have sent that and have never heard of the person whose name was listed as the sender.

I change my email passwords regularly, so I doubt someone has hacked my email account and is trying to send me fakes with the intention of getting me to open up some attachment that sends crazy malware or something like that. But, I just find these clever and disturbing. I was close to opening this one described above, but my gut sensed something was wrong. I called and am glad they said it wasn't them who sent it.

I guess my question is how on Earth would someone know to send such an email from someone I'd done business with in the past? Anyone get such "deep fake" emails? If so, how common have you found it to be?

It's so common these days. Hope the scam filter would be more sophisticated.

 

[Janus]

While a bit off the topic of scam e-mails, I just recently got, after not getting any for a long time, a scam phone call. I'm not sure exactly which one it was, because the recorded message started part way in, and I didn't wait to hear it repeat.
From what I did hear, I'm guessing it might have been either the IRS or Social Security scam.
Ironically, I have just recently been watching some you-tubes of scam-baiting.

 

[Fervent Freyja]

For sure, your post suggests that your place of employment needs to have training that deals with phishing attempts. This is a standard.

 

[kyphysics]

BE CAREFUL PEOPLE - Happened again today!

Got an email from my doctor's office. I never requested it and it looked suspicious, as the email address was weird and nothing like the doctor's office. I called. They said they have no record of sending me such an email and don't recognize the address.

 

[kyphysics]

While a bit off the topic of scam e-mails, I just recently got, after not getting any for a long time, a scam phone call. I'm not sure exactly which one it was, because the recorded message started part way in, and I didn't wait to hear it repeat.
From what I did hear, I'm guessing it might have been either the IRS or Social Security scam.
Ironically, I have just recently been watching some you-tubes of scam-baiting.

The IRS scam calls are so annoying. I've gotten...100?? or so over the past 2 years.

I can't remember if it was the IRS one or another obvious scam call, but one time I picked up the phone and said nothing JUST TO HEAR what they other party would say. Silence. Then the phone hung up (by them).

I never heard from that scam call program again. ...Haven't gotten the IRS one recently, so not sure if it was that one or not.

 

[Janus]

The IRS scam calls are so annoying. I've gotten...100?? or so over the past 2 years.

I can't remember if it was the IRS one or another obvious scam call, but one time I picked up the phone and said nothing JUST TO HEAR what they other party would say. Silence. Then the phone hung up (by them).

I never heard from that scam call program again. ...Haven't gotten the IRS one recently, so not sure if it was that one or not.

A few years ago we kept getting calls on the home phone. The machine would pick up and they would hang up. This went on for a number of days, multiple times a day. I finally picked up, and it was the tech-support scam. The one where they tell you that it has been reported to them that your computer has been compromised.
I told them that I knew that this was a scam*,and to stop calling. Even after my informing them of that, the guy on the other end tried to tell me "Sir, this is a very important matter".
I responded, "No, it isn't. Stop calling", and hung up.
The phone rang shortly after, the machine picked up, and they hung up again. The phone never rang after that.
I guess it sunk in that since I let the machine answer right after they had talked to me, I wasn't going to pick up again.
What gets me, is that even though I called them out as being a scam, they still thought they could convince me otherwise. I've seen this same pattern with some of the scam-baiting calls. The scam-baiter will fess up, tell them they knew it was a scam from the beginning and even go over step by step the lies told by the scammer.
Yet, the scammer will still try and insist that he is a certified technician working for a some real tech-support company.

*I think I also added something along the lines of not having been born yesterday.

 

[StevieTNZ]

BE CAREFUL PEOPLE - Happened again today!

It's being going on for years. Its hardly a new phenomena. This is why they should teach basic computer skills in school -- mandatory.

 

[Baluncore]

I think it is time to make spam emails more expensive for the sender.

Imagine what would happen if some organisation with the size and reach of Paypal set up an email system where, to send an email cost the sender a token 5 cents from the sender's account, and passed it to the receiver's account.

The receiver can acknowledge the email was useful, and return the 5 cents to the sender. Not returning the 5 cents would be the equivalent of unsubscribing. A subscription for one email per week would transfer 52 * $0.05 = $2.60 PA.

That is today's equivalent of a postage stamp, but the stamp is never canceled and can be reused or returned.
Spamming and scamming by email would end on that day.
It would also corner the email market.

 

[StevieTNZ]

Would receiving an email similar to this -- https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/us...ying-off-his-debt/YY3EOA4H4DRXIY3RVOXWL3ZB3A/ -- be considered SPAM or legit? I find it hard to tell. Anyone about to shed light on this?

 

[Janus]

I think it is time to make spam emails more expensive for the sender.

Imagine what would happen if some organisation with the size and reach of Paypal set up an email system where, to send an email cost the sender a token 5 cents from the sender's account, and passed it to the receiver's account.

The receiver can acknowledge the email was useful, and return the 5 cents to the sender. Not returning the 5 cents would be the equivalent of unsubscribing. A subscription for one email per week would transfer 52 * $0.05 = $2.60 PA.

That is today's equivalent of a postage stamp, but the stamp is never canceled and can be reused or returned.
Spamming and scamming by email would end on that day.
It would also corner the email market.

I doubt 5 cents per e-mail would make much of a dent. For example, let's say that for every 1000 e-mails sent out, they get one bite. That would cost them just $50.00. But a single successful scam can net them 100's or even 1000's of dollars.

 

[Rive]

I think it is time to make spam emails more expensive for the sender.

As far as I know most of these things comes through botnets (malware infected computers of unsuspecting people).
Hard to catch the real sender.

 

[Vanadium 50]

One email early on said they got my email from the original campaign I donated to and wanted to ask for my help. ...Uhhhhhhhhhhh, I did not consent.

Is there any amount of email that they could send you that would cause you to vote for the other guy? If, as I expect, the answer is "no", they have no incentive to stop.

 

[MikeeMiracle]

You can't charge for sending e-mails, who would you charge? There is no centralised point that all e-mails flow through in order for you to do such a thing, the internet was not designed that way. Data is sent from the sending servers directly to the receiving browser / server by the shortest path in the network.

Setting up an e-mail server / relay is childs play for any tech, these scammers are not sending out e-mail using gmail or Outlook.com. Anyone with their own e-mail server can send e-mail to anyone and make it appear as if it came from anyone.

 

[StevieTNZ]

You can't charge for sending e-mails, who would you charge?

ISP's? Gmail, for businesses?

 

[MikeeMiracle]

An ISP could charge for sending e-mail out using it's own e-mail servers I suppose, but my point was that these scammers are not using their ISP e-mail service and certainly not gmail, they are using their own e-mail servers.

It's all to do with how information flows around the internet at a very low level. Don't forget the internet is a global phenomenon, not like a telephone system where one country/company controls all the access points so anything you plan to do needs to be done globally by everyone who controls access to the internet.

Without analysing every tiny bit of information that flows from any computer in the world onto the main internet by any ISP in the world, this is not something you can stop. Any ISP who do not play ball or can't afford to implement expensive data analytics on every bit of data passing through them will be ripe for the scammers to use. Any encryption of the e-mail traffic will also likely make any protection redundant.

Your talking about a global effort along the lines of China's internet filtering system in every country to even contemplate this and even then there are ways past China's internet blocking.

If it was easy to "control the internet" we would not have criminal activity online :)

 

[mfb]

Email services could ask for money to accept emails ("pay or we won't show your email to our customer"), but that would be impractical for legitimate email sources.
It's easy to avoid fake mails. Avoiding them while still getting the real mails is the challenge.

 

[CharlieMauro]

These are actually kind of "decent" fakes. They make you curious. I was dumb to open the Paypal fake email, but thankfully I've resisted all others thus far.

 

[kyphysics]

These are actually kind of "decent" fakes. They make you curious. I was dumb to open the Paypal fake email, but thankfully I've resisted all others thus far.

Yeah, one thing I've learned is to call the company in question. That's saved me from opening a few VERY realistic ones.

Something else I wonder about is whether someone ELSE's account that I know is hacked (not mine). I am pretty religious about security (notwithstanding opening these dumb fakes). But, I have older aunts, uncles, etc. who are not tech savvy and just use the internet for the sole purpose of communicating with us young "kids/grandkids." I KNOW they constantly click on ads and pop-ups. I've watched them surf the net and cautioned them on this stuff before. You can tell them to run this security check up or do this or that all you want. Often they forget (or don't want to do it) or don't remember how...so they could be compromised, which is leading to possibly me getting compromised. The thing about that is I can't/won't stop communicating online with my older relatives. You love them and you'll still open their emails of course. Everyone does.

So, yeah, that's kind of an ongoing potential loop-hole into my own accounts. I'd say those over 68-ish tend to be that way. Early 60's people that I know are actually pretty tech knowledgeable on the whole from my personal experience (which is nothing more than that - a small sample size).

 

[pbuk]

I think it is time to make spam emails more expensive for the sender.

Imagine what would happen if some organisation with the size and reach of Paypal set up an email system where, to send an email cost the sender a token 5 cents from the sender's account, and passed it to the receiver's account.

The receiver can acknowledge the email was useful, and return the 5 cents to the sender. Not returning the 5 cents would be the equivalent of unsubscribing. A subscription for one email per week would transfer 52 * $0.05 = $2.60 PA.

That is today's equivalent of a postage stamp, but the stamp is never canceled and can be reused or returned.
Spamming and scamming by email would end on that day.
It would also corner the email market.

And roll back communications for every voluntary organisation 20 years, whilst leaving people looking to make money out of you the only people able to afford mass communication. Unfortunately the cure is worse than the problem.

 

[CharlieMauro]

Yeah, one thing I've learned is to call the company in question. That's saved me from opening a few VERY realistic ones.

Something else I wonder about is whether someone ELSE's account that I know is hacked (not mine). I am pretty religious about security (notwithstanding opening these dumb fakes). But, I have older aunts, uncles, etc. who are not tech savvy and just use the internet for the sole purpose of communicating with us young "kids/grandkids." I KNOW they constantly click on ads and pop-ups. I've watched them surf the net and cautioned them on this stuff before. You can tell them to run this security check up or do this or that all you want. Often they forget (or don't want to do it) or don't remember how...so they could be compromised, which is leading to possibly me getting compromised. The thing about that is I can't/won't stop communicating online with my older relatives. You love them and you'll still open their emails of course. Everyone does.

So, yeah, that's kind of an ongoing potential loop-hole into my own accounts. I'd say those over 68-ish tend to be that way. Early 60's people that I know are actually pretty tech knowledgeable on the whole from my personal experience (which is nothing more than that - a small sample size).

a global effort along the lines of China's internet filtering system in every country to even contemplate this and even then there are ways past China's internet blocking.