soho-life.com

Last week one of my clients contacted me as they’d been approached from a company in China who was ‘concerned that a domain’ similar to my client’s was going to be registered by another business.  As soon as she asked me about it I had a feeling that it was most likely either spam or a scam.  Sure enough, once she sent me a copy of the email I was positive it was a scam, however I encouraged her to seek advice from a govt dept here in Australia just to be sure.

Today I received three of these same emails - each for a different domain I own - and all along the same lines. My suspicions have been more than confirmed and just to take it further I decided to do some searches of my own online.

Below are links to just three sites warning of this scam and there are many more too.

How scammers trick you out of your domain name (1)

How scammers trick you out of your domain name (2)

Net in China domain spam

Domain scammers list

If in doubt, always best to seek advice (as my client had sought to do) and doing a search on Google or your otherwise favourite search engine is a good thing to do.  I usually copy and paste a key phrase from the email and place it into the search engine to see if anything comes up.  Sure enough, it did!

domain scam, domain name, scammers, China

Tags: Warnings by Kathie Thomas
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It keeps coming doesn’t it?  It seems someone must come up with a ‘fantastic’ idea of how to scam people out of their hard-earned money and then others pick it up too.  A wave of emails with the same topic but different send from addresses.

For awhile it was job offers to Virtual Assistants, last week it was VA Certification applications and this week it appears to be bookings for airline tickets.  Or should I say ‘Your Flight Ticket Nxxx’.  To date I have received several of these from different airlines - I mean how many flights did I book recently? Ummm, none that I recall.

For the uninitiated or those very green to the Internet, they may well take these emails as genuine and for those who have been around awhile they might be a tad wary, whereas the rest of us, just hit delete and move onto the next email.

If you are in doubt about the genuineness of an email and you don’t know the sender personally, then I encourage you to Google the subject of the email - if it’s spam or a scam, you’ll soon find references to it.  And if it doesn’t come up, then possibly it’s worth checking with someone you know who is more internet savvy than you, like your ISP or webhost for example.  And even if it was sent to you by someone you know well - always worth checking anyway.  They might have been infected by a virus or trojan and are unaware the email came from their address at all.

Tags: Warnings by Kathie Thomas
1 Comment »

I’ve written about it often in newsletters and in blogs and I’ve emailed everyone who includes me on a list using To: and CC: and advise them of the proper way to send broadcast emails. I’m astounded at how many business people just do not seem to know or understand this simple way of protecting their lists.

My series on Email Etiquette has been republished in many articles and publications online and in printed publications also. They are also amongst some of the most viewed articles at Evan Carmichael’s Motivation and Strategies for Entrepreneurs. Pity the staff at Ticketek didn’t read them.

Last week my husband received an email from Ticketek with a long list of email addresses in the To: field. What a blunder and a public blunder at that. We were astounded at the time that they would do that and he emailed them advising he was unsubscribing from their list.

In The Age today there is an article about a Spam Alert after Ticketek email blunder. They’ve highlighted how it is a privacy breach but I have other concerns about what this could do.

If any of the recipients have a virus or Trojan on their computers the rest of the recipients are at risk if they don’t have up-to-date antivirus programs active on their computers. But more to the point, their email addresses have just been given away to any of those people on that list keen to build their own lists. What a giveaway!

Let this be a lesson to all who broadcast emails to lists of people. DO NOT USE the To: or CC: fields if you are sending email to a list of people. It should not be done. Get into the habit of using BCC which protects and hides the email addresses of everyone on your list. Each individual will only see their address and no-one else’s when this is done properly.

Broadcast email, spam, To:, BCC, Ticketek

Tags: Warnings by Kathie Thomas
3 Comments »

I’ve just come across this article which I think is worthwhile reading for anyone who has content that could be copied.

Copyright Infringement: What If Someone Is Stealing From You?

Located perpetrator is key

By: John Dozier

As attorneys specializing in the litigation of Internet disputes, not a day goes by that we do not hear about a small online business getting ripped off through the theft of online content. Sometimes the property taken is a website or part of a website. Other times it is certain code or an e-book. But whenever it happens, you can be sure of one thing: It has value to the thief….

Click on the heading link for the full article.

copyright, stealing content, website, ebook

Tags: About Blogging, Warnings, Writing by Kathie Thomas
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