The Village Websmith - Selected Blog Item

Scammers rely on a number of factors being in place to bring them a response. Firstly, they want busy people to respond without reading or scrutinising their messages too much. They also rely on curiosity, greed and creating a degree of anger in their target audience.

Another vital factor is the honesty of their intended victims. That may sound odd, but with the vast majority of us being honest, law abiding citizens who pay their bills and observe the rules. By living such a life, we are not familiar with documents telling us that we are in breach of some regulation. This makes it easier for them to pass off their scam emails as coming from some authority or other.

In this case, the offenders have hedged their bets by starting off with a genuine email from the TV licence bods. It is so easy to do that most 8 year olds today could have produced this document. Just copy the code through your web client, browser or even word processor, change the links to yours and re-send.

The two responses they are looking for are "Oh gosh! I must have taken my eye off the ball for a moment." and "How dare they? I never miss paying that bill, I'll tell them". Whatever your reason, as soon as you click the link you are lost.

As always, hovering over the links in your web client is the acid test. So far, that is the only part that can't convincingly be spoofed. I am sure that one day, even that will be achieved by the scumbags. In the meantime, keep rolling over the links and if they aren't what it says on the wrapper, delete.

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