Another round of fake BCM Account emails

[HighTechRedneck]

I just noticed another round of ficticious emails caught by my spam filter supposedly from busconversions.com Member Services with a subject line of busconversions.com account notification.

Those are fake and absolutely not from us.   If you use an email client like Outlook Express or Outlook, you can right click the message, choose "options" and view the message header.  In there you can see that it is not actually from an email address even related to us.  For example, one of them was actually received from rindf5@roc-edge.com but had been "Joe Jobbed" to look like it came from support@busconversions.com (we don't even have that as an email address).  And that subject line is not one we use.

So if you see emails from busconversions.com Member Services and/or with a subject line of busconversions.com account notification don't open it and definitely don't open any attachments or click any links in it.

Mike

[gus]

This is important enough to go back up front again.

After all the warnings via all kinds of media it is hard to believe there are still people who will open email attachments or links from unknowns!!

[HighTechRedneck]

Yup, sometimes it amazes me that after so much coverage in the news that there are still people that fall for all the spam gimmicks and phishing schemes.  But there are simply so many people that are completely new to the Internet and didn't pay attention to news reports about it before because at that time they weren't using the Internet.  And scammers are getting more and more profficient at making the look legit.  Some of the  Banking, PayPal, eBay & Facebook phishing scams that I have seen lately look very official. 

People really need to know that banks, credit card companies, govt. agencies, etc. no longer initiate contact by email asking the person to open an attachment or click a link in the email.  They will direct you to go to their site yourself and use your standard login method.  That way you can have good reason to believe that you are actually on the applicable company's/agency's website and not a look alike phishing site.

Of course the danger in those type of phishing scams is you enter your login information on their look alike site and they record it.  Even if nothing else happens, they now have the ability to go to the real site and login as you.  Worse, many of them set up that look alike site and pretend to be doing "account verification", asking you to enter your account number(s), name, address, phone, email address, and sometimes even SS#.  At that point they have all they need to carry out an identity theft.

In our case, we don't have anything critical behind our login.  But they still phish for username/password.  That way they can login as the user and harvest email addresses from the member list or they can login and post spam messages, send PM spams.  Phil has done an outstanding job of protecting the forum from countless spammer registration attempts.  But it would only take one person to respond to one of these fake emails and enter their username/password.  Then the spammer has access to the member list. 

That is how some of that happened with Facebook accounts a couple months ago.  Likely those Facebook members received a fake email pretending to be from Facebook and clicked a link that took them to a fake Facebook login.  Once they entered it, the scammers had access to their Facebook account.  When the victim changed their password, it no longer mattered because the scammer had already retrieved their friends list and any other info, avatars, photos, etc.  They they were able to send out more fake emails that looked quite real to those on the victim's friends list, hoping to fetch more victims.

Bottom line - never login to any site as the result of a link in an email you receive from anybody.    Not your bank, credit card, govt., insurance company or any forum or social network.  If you think the message is legit, close it and go to the applicable website your normal way and login.  Then locate the pertinent information via the website's menu systems.