Spam Parking notice

LHW99

I received an email purporting to be from Havering Council yesterday. It looked very official - but:

a) It has a .com "from address" - Havering borough Council emails are all from (havering.).gov.uk
b) The links to the "photographic evidence" and "challenge the bill" are to a russian website
c) It says "Parking charge notice", but then mentions a police constable - police notices are "penalty charge notices" and should come by post.
d) The last line says the charge will reduce after 28 days - real ones increase.

Tried to report it to Action F(raud) but the NPIB email address I was told to forward the email to didn't work. The email was returned with a "time out" message. I asked the AF live chat who said resend it, but the same thing happened.

Similar ones have apparently also been sent out in N. Ireland
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-3889469

forgotmyname

No link from your vehicle to an email address so it would be silly to fool for a scam like this.

If there is no name and address and vehicle reg then there would be no need to do anything other than mark it as spam.

On your email client do you see the from address which can be faked or the genuine senders address?

I use thunderbird for email and silly thing doesnt show the real sender out of the box, need to use an addon. sender@ or @sender?

pogofish

Umpteen threads about these jokers here already - and yes it is a spam issue, so one for the Tecchie forum and not motoring/parking tix. Was the English text somewhat florid as well..?

And if you clicked that link in the email, you may want to investigate the PC security threads unless you are already well protected.

LHW99

On your email client do you see the from address which can be faked or the genuine senders address?

I use Mailwasher, so can see the from address, hence noting that it was .com, not .gov.uk
I do use Thunderbird, but keep these things on the webmail / delete directly.

And if you clicked that link in the email, you may want to investigate the PC security threads unless you are already well protected.

Thanks Pogofish, but no I don't click on links. My webmail lets me hover to see what comes up. Interstingly Mailwasher didn't show the links in this one (when looking at the raw source) although usually it does pick them up.

forgotmyname

Some clients actually run the scripts on the site in links automatically. One of the pitfalls of outlook all those years ago.

Just having the spam appear in your previous window was enough to infect your PC.

Links and embedded stuff is what you need to be wary of.