Email unsubscribing: Top Financials Ltd (and others)

PhylPho

An elderly though not doddery relative goes to some kind of afternoon social gathering to which 'specialist' speakers are occasionally invited to talk on different subjects. Recently, the subject was IT, and specifically, how to protect yourself against fraudulent emails.

Spam filtering was explained, and also the 'unsubscribe' facility, and it was apparently recommended that because the former can be inaccurate, the latter is more reliable. As I'm always worried about vapid generalisations, I warned my relative not to accept this kind of stuff as Gospel. But I thought I'd check his email set-up anyway.

I've just popped round there and by chance have seen in his in-box an email with an unsubscribe facility which he says he would've used.

The email is headed: Frank, Maximise your cmpensation with ther right solicitor. The reply-to is: customerservices a t topfinancials.co.uk. The message is from: personalinjury a t playdealornodeal.org.uk. The message body is incomprehensible crap: "Take the 30 second main now, select your injury, find out how to claim compensation. National Injury Solicitors is a trading name of Accident Advice Helpline."

Beneath this garbage is: This email is brought to you by an independent marketing company, not from the advertiser directly. Top Financials Ltd, 43, Broomfield Road, Chelmsford, Essex CM1 1SY.

No more Email: //thebestflowerdisountscom/public/unsubscribe.

Clearly, this is a brain-dead scam operation run by an illiterate address harvester who can't even reconcile a legal services domain name with that of a, er, florist. But, but, but. . .

My relative was just about to use the 'unsubscribe' facility -- because he thought that "genuine" emails allowed you to unsubscribe, whereas spam emails don't.

I've now tried to explain to my relative that replying to *any* unexpected email from a hitherto unknown source is the same as responding to a spammer with a letter of outrage.

The "unsubscribe" facility in all such emails is a scam.

The fact that his email address is now in the hands of a scumbag with a fictitious address (43 Broomfield Road, Chelmsford, may well be real but it's never going to be genuine) shows just what happens when the gullible go the 'unsubscribe' route: in seeking to stop emails from one scammer, unsubscribing merely validates their address, after which scammer 1 sells that address to scammer 2 and so on ad infinitum.

I don't know if the elderly folks who listened to the advice given at that social gathering misheard what was being said, or whether the speaker really was an irresponsible idiot unable to distinguish between unsubscribing from a service to which a person has signed up and unsubscribing from a service to which a person never has.

Either way, I'm posting this here in hope anyone else with a friend or relative unfamiliar with the ways of scammers can check to make sure that their friend or relative is not falling for the "unsubscribe" trick. And that they don't rely on Gmail's unsubscribe facility, either.

PS: my relative's encounter with scammers of the kind I've seen today appear to have started with an online car insurance comparison site. This isn't the first time I've seen the downside of dealing with screenscraper "services".

milesoneill

What crazy advice from this so-called IT specialist!
I once had a colleague who insisted on replying to spam that made it through, asking to be removed from their distribution list!!!

For me, this is how I deal with spam:
Use 2 email accounts - One as my main email for friends, family, legit purchases etc. The other email address for the odd site that requires "registration" before purchasing/posting to forums etc.

When an email arrives, if the sender is unknown look at the subject. If the subject is obscure then best delete the email. If the subject seems legit, but on opening is clearly spam, then add sender to block list. If there is an attachment, delete email.

I never never never unsubscribe, at this will often show the sender that the email account is active, and to spammers, that email address is now worth money.

After all that I get about 1-2 spam emails a week which are easily dealt with. From time to time I check my junk mail folder to make sure nothing is getting binned which shouldn't be.

The great thing about email is how easy it is to deal with spam. Not like actual junk mail, which you've to gather up throughout the day and stuff it into the recycle bin (which is undoubtedly already full of junk mail!)

Miles.

PhylPho

milesoneill wrote: »

What crazy advice from this so-called IT specialist!
I once had a colleague who insisted on replying to spam that made it through, asking to be removed from their distribution list!!! Miles.

Well, I'm just hoping the advice was misunderstood, though the fact that it was apparently given by a volunteer who devotes time to something called 'University of The Third Age' (huh?) makes me wonder. . .

Conflicting advice over how to treat spam goes back a way; I remember advising *against* using the spam bounce facility that (I think) used to be offered / is still offered with the much-vaunted Mailwasher app. Whereas a friend of mine said it was a brilliant way of 'flooding' a spammer's inbox. Yeah. Ri-ii-ght. . .

It's certainly true that spam didn't originally have unsubscribe links, but as the scumbags responsible for this garbage have grown ever more desperate, they've cottoned onto the fact that legitimate organisations offer an unsubscribe facility so they'd better start copying.

My relative has unsubscribed from several such providers, including Argos, Thomson Holidays and Amazon, but of course all those are known quantities, whilst a bottom-feeder like Top Financials Ltd all too plainly is not.

I've actually set him up with three different gmail accounts because his ISP is for reasons unknown utterly incapable of running server-side filtering. In fact, I've told him not to use the email addy provided by his ISP: a service without server-side protection isn't worth using at all.

And I've repeated the warning about online comparison websites: they really are potentially dangerous avenues to tread where email address harvesters and similar scumbags are concerned.

ahillsy

Note that you don't have to reply to/click on anything in the email for the sender to be able to detect whether it's an active email account or not - just opening an email *could* tell them that. Just make sure images are blocked by default which they are in e.g. Windows Live Mail.

I personally judge emails in different ways:
1) those I know to be from a genuine source - just unsubscribe
2) if 1) doesn't work, mark as junk
3) those I know to be dodgy, or it's unclear - just delete

PhylPho

ahillsy wrote: »

Note that you don't have to reply to/click on anything in the email for the sender to be able to detect whether it's an active email account or not - just opening an email *could* tell them that. Just make sure images are blocked by default which they are in e.g. Windows Live Mail.

I personally judge emails in different ways:
1) those I know to be from a genuine source - just unsubscribe
2) if 1) doesn't work, mark as junk
3) those I know to be dodgy, or it's unclear - just delete

Good advice.

I've shown my relative how to open emails without, um, opening them by going into the message's Properties. And he also understands the wisdom of *never* having the Preview pane enabled.

Still surprises me though, the number of friends I know who have Preview running and who also open suspect emails in the conventional way.

tronator

milesoneill wrote: »

When an email arrives, if the sender is unknown look at the subject. If the subject is obscure then best delete the email. If the subject seems legit, but on opening is clearly spam, then add sender to block list. If there is an attachment, delete email.

This looks like a "poor man's spam filter" to me. Adding an email address to a blacklist doesn't help in the majority of cases. It's very unlikely that you receive Spam from the same email address more than once.

And sometimes you get SPAM from a known address if this person's PC got infected. Do you add this address to your blacklist too?