And receiving this email on my Apple machine made it slightly harder to detect – the link that is in the email has the anchor text of order information and unlike in Outlook, hovering the mouse over the link does not show where it actually points to. However, pressing the link could be fatal.

So, being careful and looking without pressing the link, I managed to confirm that the link does not go to the Apple store, but to a third party website. What happens when you click the link I did not want to find out. Maybe the site collects your logon information, or it could immediately install a virus. Let’s not find out.

Here’s the content of one of the two emails that I received over night:

Apple Store
Call 1-800-MY-APPLE

To purchase by phone, please call 1-800-MY-APPLE

                          

Of course, why would any anyone want to know your name, email address and password to upgrade your email account? Simple – because they want access to your email and unlike your email provider, there is no master password.

In fact, any upgrade to security would NOT involve them logging on as you. They might insist that you update your password (something that a lot of ISPs do not provide easy access to), but they would never ask you for your password.

So, what could they do when they got your details? Send emails from you? Yes, but they can actually do that already. Far worse is they might have access to your list of contacts and be able to email them as if it were from you, but even that is that they can read your emails.

And if reading your emails does not sound bad then stop and think what can be involved there. It could be the start of identity theft! The next post will explain that!

Attn:

Support.

                          

Quite simply, it is an email asking you to verify your website’s hosting set-up. It is very easy to get hold of a list of website owners and to send such an email. What they can then do once you have conscientiously told them your logon details is to use your website as the next stepping stone in the chain. Maybe you will host the next ‘verification’ page and wonder why your traffic is going through the roof. Or maybe your site will be used to host some page in which the phishing is targeted at online banking.

In short, if you are sent an email and asked to click a link and validate ownership, do not click the link. If you are worried, just sign on as your normally would. But avoid clicking on the link in the email at all costs.

Here is the content of the email.

Dear Customer,

Designated trademarks and brands are the property of their respective owners.

                          

Firstly the caller asked me if I was Mr Thompson. When I told him that I wasn’t, he just confirmed that I was the owner of the phone line and then introduced himself as someone giving free computer help. It was made out to be a pretty ordinary service.

After making sure I was sitting in front of the computer he got me to right click on My Computer and select Manage, then to find Event View.

He then got me to count all of the error and warning messages within Application, Security and System. All fairly safe so far, but he was insistent that I should not click on any of these error messages.

Now these error messages are harmless. That is probably why he did not want me to click on them and made them out to be dangerous to click on. If I had, I would have seen the error message and recognised them as when software etc had hung in the past.

For example, one of the warnings is an application purposely preventing the system going to standby – because it needed the computer to keep running.

He then tried to talk me through the next part of the scam, which was to open the run prompt and go to www.logmein123.com. This was needed because the machine would die within a few weeks if not corrected. At that point it was time to end the call.

The next step, from what I have read, is to give them access to your machine (using the innocent third party service) and then they will clear the errors and fix the machine.

Actually, the report says that they fill your computer with software that virtually blackmails a payment out of you for a couple of hundred. Refuse to pay and you can’t use your computer!

If you do have random people phoning up offering help to sort your computer, just put the phone down. They are not really randomly phoning people to give assistance and sometimes even go as far to say that there have been lots of problems reported in your street!

And never give someone access to your computer if you have not invited them in. It is dangerous and expensive!

                          

So you receive the email on the right (click to enlarge). It clearly tells you:

“We are planning to sell communicatinggreen.com in the next couple of days. Since you own [your domain], I thought you might be interested in communicatinggreen.com.

“You will also maximize the value of [your domain] by buying communicatinggreen.com.”

So they own this website and it has traffic and they want to sell it. Right?

Who currently owns this website?
Wrong! But, what exactly is going on. Well next I looked at the whois information for this domain, which is basically when it was registered and when it will expire.

The key lines here are:
Status: pendingDelete
Updated Date: 11-jun-2010
Creation Date: 31-mar-2009
Expiration Date: 31-mar-2010

What this tells us is that the domain name was first registered only last year (31-March-09) and was allowed to expire this year. It is also “Pending Delete”, which means that it has not been renewed and is going to expire. No-one owns is.

What are Premium Value Domains offering?
So, is this a scam? Not quite. What Premium Value Domains are offering to do for you is to grab the expired URL as soon as it becomes available. But, they are not doing this and then hoping to find a buyer, they are finding a buyer and then hoping to buy the old name – another company could equally well get it before them.

Are the benefits genuine?
Is it worth buying it? I would say not! Looking at Alexa there is no traffic ranking; looking at the Way Back When archive there is no old website and searching on Google only finds about 20 entries for the domain name, all of these being references to this pending deletion.

Why then would it “increase your traffic to [website]“ and “maximize the value of [your website]“?

In short, it won’t. There is no hidden value in an expired name that appears never to have had a website hosted and therefore, has never had any traffic.

What should you do?
My advice to you if you receive such spam is to delete it. Should by some fluke the domain name be a good name for you, then approach suitable companies yourself who can buy expiring domains. Do not reply to spam as you do not know how much over the odds they might charge and it encourages more spam.

                          

Some customers have received this email, which I have also received myself. All it seems to be is a way of trying to persuade you to register a few unnecessary domain names. I suppose that calling it a scam is a bit strong, but the idea is for you to part with your cash to register copies of your current .com domain under a variety of endings.

Whether it goes any further once they have your payment details I have never heard. But unless you really want copies of your domain name that end .cn etc, there really is no point in replying to the email!

Dear Sir/Madam

Yours sincerely
Aimee
Oversea Marketing Manager

                          

I was only asked to start building this website on Thursday afternoon, so it was a bit of a mad rush. The URL was registered later that afternoon, the first pages put up during the afternoon and the majority of the site built as the text arrived on Monday.

And as you can see from the screen print (click on it to expand it), it may only be Wednesday morning now, but it is 5th on Google when searched for by name.

OK, you would expect that, but this time 6 days ago I’d never even heard of the company. We’ve got the site built and listed in Google in that time. Over the next couple of weeks I’m hoping that it might just climb above one or both of those directories that are currently in top spot. Plus, with a change to the pages that I have just put in place having seen the search engine results, the listing should stand out as the business’ own website and the changes should help raise it up the listings.

So hopefully we have done the trick. Quite an ask, but a new website from scratch and 7 out of its 11 pages listed in Google. Who says new sites can’t get onto Google quickly? They can – if you know what you are doing.

                          

As a courtesy to domain name holders, we are sending you this notification for your business Domain name search engine registration.  This letter is to inform you that it’s time to send in your registration and save.

This Notice for: godiving.org will expire on December 01,2009 Act today!

Obviously, it’s trying to induce panic. The notice expires tomorrow, it has to be acted upon quickly.  But what is it offering? It seems to be annual search engine submission. Why though? The website is listed in search engines and gets hundreds of hits per day, through search engines.

In fact, the service they seem to be offering is a waste of time – “annual submission to search engines” – just where is the point? Is it saying to Google each year ‘I still exist’. Google knows that – it can see your entire site and knows just how many visitors it is sending to you. It can, if it wishes, monitor how many people it sends through it’s search engine listings and how quickly they make another search. Big Brother like? Unbelievable? Maybe not, but too much for today… Maybe tomorrow.

Back to the subject – Search engines know that your site exists and it is, or isn’t, getting traffic. Telling them each month or each year is a waste of time. If you want to so it, it will take 2 minutes, definitely not worth $75 for one year. Even the text at the bottom of the email makes it clear:

Search engine submission is an optional service that you can use as a part of your website optimization and alone may not increase the traffic to your site.

So they admit it ‘may not’ do any good. If you are already listed, I’d say it will not do any good. Using such basic measures, especially weekly, is just like waving a flag to Google saying ‘Please list me, I’m not getting listed, my site isn’t working.’ Would that really make a search engine want to list you?

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