Scam alert: bogus emails

Are you about to go on a date with a felon, or hire one for your business? The felon just may be the scammer pretending to be from Instant Checkmate, a legitimate company which offers background checks.

The email offer I received recently to search for the background of a social or business contact had appealing, well-done graphics. But an email from a website csud.eu was an immediate and telltale sign that this offer was far from a reliable source of information about North American felons.

At best, the scam email takes your money and gives you nothing in return. At worst, you could be introducing a virus that turns your computer into a robot for identity thieves.

In fact, there are hundreds of complaints about Instant Checkmate on the consumer rights website Consumer Affairs, which also tells me that Instant Checkmate is based in San Diego. I have to wonder why they are sending emails from some made-up URL out of Europe. Do they know? Do they care?

Yes, they do know, and, yes, they do care. An Instant Checkmate spokesperson told they had nothing to do with this email I received, and are actively pursuing scammers like this who are misusing Instant Checkmate’s name.

Another email received recently, featuring an attractive, grey-haired over fifty couple, invites me to “click here” to assess whether or not I am susceptible to osteoporosis. The offer lists a post office box in in Houston, right next to the “click here to unsubscribe from future offers”. So why is the URL coming from Europe, with a dot-eu suffix? And why is the offer to help me end depression from the same post office box, but from a different URL. Depression from ktxk and osteoporosis from lvrk, both from a dot-EU website?

Are these American scammers trying to game the system by basing their URLs in Europe? Or are these European scammers trying to game the system by adding a post office box address in the USA?

Actually, I’ve been getting a lot of emails lately from .eu websites, as many as a dozen a week.

They offer cheap dental insurance, coupons for cheap pet food, offers of cheap home financing, free trial of e-cigarettes, and so on. Each offer has appealing graphics, and each is from a website made up of random letters that don’t spell anything in any language. zzah. zstu. brfd. bjmp. cfzi. dyfc. fqqw. xxoe. lvrk.

I can’t tell you if zzah or fqqw sent me more than one email, since as soon as I get one of these fraud, phishing, scam emails, I set the domain to “auto purge” so anything else from that creep sender will bounce back to that creep sender as undeliverable.

Consumer beware: never click on any links from senders you don’t know, most especially the “click here to unsubscribe”. Doing that will just validate your email address, so the scam, phishing, fraud sender can sell your “active and responding” email address to the next scram, phishing fraud sender.