It's obviously phishing season...

[ffutures]

I think there has been a sudden upsurge in phishing and spamming since several emails got through gmail's filters yesterday. Seems OK now, so they've probably upped their game with more computer power or something.

But I just had a text claiming to be from PayPal. Somehow I doubted that Paypal really do send texts that contain nothing to indicate that they know anything about me other than their number, and ask me to click on a link that isn't Paypal to resolve the problem. So I checked with Paypal (via their web site, not this link, of course) and needless to say they hadn't contacted me.

While I was checking this out I wanted to look up the phone number that sent the text and found that most of the sites that can do a lookup charge for everything. Since I only wanted to know the carrier I did some more searching and eventually found this site, which is free:

https://www.area-codes.org.uk/mobile/

It turned out it came from Vodaphone, which I suppose is possible, except that the last genuine text I had from Paypal came from a five-digit phone number, which I'm pretty sure is only possible for really big corporations.

No real moral here, just thought others might find that URL useful.

Comments

[kedamono]

I've seen that to lately. I've gotten emails for various "health" products or services that are obvious spam mails. But then I get a couple that look like they are from credit reporting services that I have used in the past. But there are telltales that it's spam, mostly because they all have two CCs that are random letters and numbers. The same as the other spam.

One thing I've notice though, is that my ad blocker software isn't blocking certain banner ads on some sites, both on Chrome and Safari. I think there's new code in place that the ad blockers haven't picked up on yet.

[ffutures]

I'm reporting anything I get which should hopefully help.

Haven't had any unusual problems with ads on web sites lately, but I haven't been visiting any that have a particularly poor record in that respect - fanfiction.net was the worst, and Ghostery blocks their ads completely.

[history_monk]

Might be due to a botnet that's returned to spamming: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/07/destructive-emotet-botnet-returns-with-250k-strong-blast-of-toxic-email/

[ffutures]

Think one or two of the emails looked a bit like that, but they were obviously out of context so I didn't open the links.