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    "Apple" phishing

    Had a couple of phishing e-mails from "Apple" over the last week or so - fake I-tunes invoices with links to a site where you can no doubt cancel your "subscription" by giving all your card details etc. There are a few clues as to the bogus nature of the messages, but at first glance they look very convincing, with some quite inventive attention to detail. The one bizarre thing about them, though, is that in itemising the "VAT at 20 per cent" included in the bill, they get nowhere near the correct arithmetic. I mean, I'm not just saying they forgot to put 20/120 of the gross rather than 20 per cent, rather the amount is just an apparently random number of vaguely the right order of magnitude.

    #2
    "Apple" phishing

    Yeah, I had one a couple of weeks ago. When you go to cancel, it asks for your Windows details, so I knew it was dodgy, and marked it as such.

    My wife had one at the weekend, and when she went to cancel, our McAfee gave her a warning, so it's obviously been spotted by the protection world.

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      #3
      "Apple" phishing

      so it's obviously been spotted by the protection world.
      Glad to know that. There's a special place in hell for phishing fraudsters.

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        #4
        "Apple" phishing

        Ms Felicity's had 3 of these now. very plausible, as the itunes account is in her name, but I do a lot of the buying: two very plausible Motown songs mentioned by name in the latest attempt, and the other ones both mentioned Netflix, which I have subscribed to, but not via iTunes.

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          #5
          "Apple" phishing

          Moi aussi

          To be fair to the tax-dodging cunts their support is pretty good. The woman on the end of the phone laughed when I read out the transaction number assuring me it was fake.
          Mine was a £50 iTunes subscription from 'Thomas's IPhone'.

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            #6
            "Apple" phishing

            I got one of these around 4 months ago, and did my responsible citizen bit by forwarding it with full headers to Apple. Got another about a month ago (again reported) and three or four this week (given up now).

            I so nearly fell completely for the first one, and did give them a couple of passwords before the inconsistencies registered* and the truth began to dawn. Even so, and with full knowledge it was a scam, when I showed the email to my (decently tech savvy) Mum so she would be forewarned if she or my Dad got targeted, she initially wouldn't believe it was fake. They do look pretty convincing.

            * - the main one being the email was sent to a non-Apple email that I would never use for app purchases, and that Apple certainly wouldn't b using to get in touch with me.

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              #7
              "Apple" phishing

              Calvert wrote: Mine was a £50 iTunes subscription from 'Thomas's IPhone'.
              Even if newer scammers can't get the maths of 20% VAT right, the original designers of this scam at least had some twisted brains to them. The psychology of it is quite clever. One sees a subscription that you are supposedly paying for, but didn't take out. And there is a button to 'cancel' exactly where you want it. It triggers a part of the brain that says "something is going wrong! I must put this right ASAP. Ah, that is how I can do it"
              My first assumption was that someone had in fact hacked by Apple account, and was spending my money via it. The sick twist being that in my rush to stop my account being hacked when it really hadn't, I nearly gave up enough information to let someone do precisely that.

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                #8
                "Apple" phishing

                Ha! Yeah, that's it. It's very clever. The email/invoice was brilliantly authentic. I hadn't used the iTunes account for years since - the shame - I had to download that Gerry And The Pacemakers song (the one shamelessly nicked from Celtic) as I was working a Liverpool Legends night, and couldn't trust the YouTube version. I'd a fair idea it was a scam but just phoned Apple to make sure.
                It's certainly a lot more sophisticated than some Nigerian zillionaire wanting you go hold some of his cash in your account for a while, I'll give them that.

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                  #9
                  "Apple" phishing

                  Calvert wrote:
                  To be fair to the tax-dodging cunts their support is pretty good.
                  Not my experience at all. When my iTunes account was hacked a few years ago (which luckily for me my bank noticed and stopped payments from until they'd checked with me) they basically refused to acknowledge that such a thing was possible and that it must have been that my card was compromised (it wasn't as the bank were able to confirm). Both I and the bank told Apple repeatedly that there was a hole in their security which they never responded to (I am assuming , vaguely charitably, that they thought it better to try and deal with the hole but never acknowledge that it ever existed.) They're fucking shysters.

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                    #10
                    "Apple" phishing

                    Different experiences, I guess.
                    I got straight through and they couldn't have been more helpful.

                    Maybe she was just relieved I wasn't phoning in a bomb warning?

                    I had the opposite experience once with my bank who point-blank refused to believe my card had been hacked and I had in fact ordered a couple of MacBooks to be delivered to a London address.

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                      #11
                      "Apple" phishing

                      Possibly because the problem in your case originates from outsie Apple. They want to solve the problem and be seen to be doing so, because it makes the look good (and because they actually do have a customer service ethos buried deep down in their massive corporate greed). In my case, the problem originated inside Apple, so the last thing they wanted to do was to deal with it (or say that they were dealing with it) or admit it was a problem in any way, because to have done so would have opened up a massive can of worms - especially as they've always prided themselves on their security record. (Extensive internet searches back then made it very clear that this was indeed a widespread and serious issue, but they managed to keep a pretty good lid on it by never publically acknowledging it, and indeed doing everything they could to suppress any mention of it. If you posted about it on their facebook page, for example, you could guarantee that post would disappear within seconds.

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                        #12
                        "Apple" phishing

                        Sounds perfectly feasible.

                        Wonder how much they pay the poor sap who has to trawl their FB account to remove negative messages?

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                          #13
                          "Apple" phishing

                          Even if newer scammers can't get the maths of 20% VAT right, the original designers of this scam at least had some twisted brains to them. The psychology of it is quite clever. One sees a subscription that you are supposedly paying for, but didn't take out. And there is a button to 'cancel' exactly where you want it. It triggers a part of the brain that says "something is going wrong! I must put this right ASAP. Ah, that is how I can do it"
                          I have the opposite reaction. Whenever I get an email that wants me to click on something, it triggers a part of my brain that says, "something is going to go wrong". I spent half an hour effectively researching the NHS's public-facing IT systems yesterday when they sent me confirmation of my registration at the local clinic because I was convinced it was a scam and I refused to open the attached PDF.

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