Skype voicemail scam

Boring, boring, boring. No, not Skype. Skype is good, and useful, and free, and fabulous when you want to talk to your sister in Spain for an hour without worrying about the cost. What's boring is the latest scam going around.

Have you received an email recently telling you that you've got a Skype voicemail - and to 'open the attached file' to listen to it?

This is an automated email, please don’t reply.

Voice Message Notification

You received a new message from Skype voicemail service.

Message Details: Time of Call: Wed, 27 Nov 2013 16:59:10 +0200

Length of Call: 37sec

Listen to the message in the attached file.

Take a closer look. The email address it's coming from, for a start. Mine was sent by izgsikige@business.telecomitalia.it. Looks like an authentic Skype Customer services address, doesn't it? Not.

Don't even go there. Firstly, it's a zip file (clue: anything can be hidden in a zip file, which includes malware, so always view these with extreme caution to start with).

Secondly, Skype voicemail messages are only ever delivered through Skype itself; if you get a notification that you've a voicemail, it will be in the form of an alert to log on to your Skype account and listen to it there. If you want to check, do just that: log on to your Skype account in the usual way. If there's a legit voicemail for you, it will be waiting for you there. But there won't be: Skype wouldn't be sending it as an attachment.

Actually, almost any message that tells you to 'open the attached file' for further information has the potential to be dodgy. The bank? Ebay? PayPal? Facebook? All these will direct you to log on to your own private account, and any genuine requests or messages will be found there.

Oh, and what's that you say? You don't even have a voicemail facility set up on your Skype account? Well, there's a surprise.

Delete, delete, delete.

And tell your friends to do the same.

Fake 'burglary' accusation

I was rather startled this morning to receive the following email in my capacity as President of apdo-uk - the Association that supports, promotes and develops our industry of professional organising and decluttering.

Name: Kathie
Email address: kathiekearns@gmail.com
Organisation: Kathie

Hello, I am writing in an unusual case ... Some time ago, I used your services, and one of your employees face was familiar to me. At dinner with my wife, it turned out that he was a burglar, who 5 years ago broke into our home!!! This is ridiculous!!! How you can hire criminals? I found at least 3 bad entries for him at website for background check!! I am sure there are more!!! Please do something about it, things like that are ridiculous!!!

I didn't have serious concerns about it, for several reasons. Firstly, apdo-uk is not an employer at all, but an Association, and we have clear disclaimers all over our site: it's the clients' responsibility to check the appropriateness and credentials of any of our members they wish to work with. Secondly, the email refers to a man, and out of 105 current members just five of them are men. They picked an organisation with entirely the wrong demographic for this message.

And then, of course, there's the overall style of the email. Poor grammar, excessive exclamation marks... the hallmark of a spammer.

I replied briefly in any case, pointing out the above, and also that I'd need explicit details before investigating any of our members further. However, a quick trawl on Google afterwards proved my suspicions. The (probably fictitious) Kathie Kearns has sent many such emails, especially to folks in the hospitality industry, as I found on this online noticeboard. [This particular gmail address appears also on several lists of noted spammers.]

The question was: why? The email I received contained no links nor attachments. If it was spam in the real sense, one of those would surely have been present. However, looking at the reports on the above forum from other folks that have been spammed, this idiot proves to be exceptionally bad at their job: in my email, they've missed out the link (to a site called Everifies, ostensibly providing online checks on businesses). I don't suggest clicking on it - although according to the forum, the website has now been taken down in any case.

I'm posting this to flag up the situation in the hope that my article will also appear in Google searches for key phrases or for this email address, if anybody else, like me, is suspicious. However, as one poster on the forum put it, "with 40 branches around the country it had me going for a minute". It would be very easy for a member of a large corporation to take the accusation seriously, and to follow a link to a site that may well have had malware.

Honestly. Even the quality of spammers is deteriorating!

What's in a (domain) name?

Most businesses, no matter how small, have a website these days. Whether it's a simple set of information about your business and your contact details, or a more intricate site to sell your products or interact with your customers, it's generally accepted that some kind of online presence is vital.

With this, of course, goes your email address. The question is, if you've been using a generic email - such as hotmail, googlemail, yahoo, BT or similar - it doesn't match your domain name; and bear in mind that it doesn't look too professional, either. You might have been using joebloggs@gmail.com, but once your business is using the domain name www.greatestproduct.co.uk, you need to ensure that your email matches. Trust me on this one: it's all about professional credibility (as pointed out recently by Heather Townsend on Twitter). I agree! I'm always a little suspicious if I find myself emailing an address that doesn't match the corresponding website.

So how to do this? If you have a website designer, they should be able to set this up for you easily. It can be done in a couple of different ways. First, you might have a redirect - which means that you are still using joebloggs@gmail.com, but messages addressed to joe@greatestproduct.co.uk are redirected (much as snail-mail is when you move house) to your gmail inbox.

(Alternatively, you can use the POP3 or IMAP protocols to collect your email direct from the server of the company that hosts your website.)

The second step is to ensure that your 'official' (i.e. business) email address is used when you are sending emails out. It's no good receiving messages to joe@greatestproduct.co.uk if your replies to enquiries are shown as coming from gmail. There are several ways around this, depending on how you're accessing your messages in the first place (via gmail on the web, for instance; or using Windows Mail, Thunderbird or any one of a number of local email programs). Each of these has appropriate settings to enable you to show your emails as coming 'from' the address of your choice; you'll usually have to go through a security procedure to prove that you are entitled to send messages 'from' that address.

If the above paragraphs send you into a flat spin, don't worry. Either ask your website designer to advise you on the necessary procedures, and preferably implement them for you; or, if you are running the site yourself, have a look in the Help pages of your website host (or web email provider).

Or you could ask a passing friendly geek. Or contact me, if you like!

Either way, do make sure that your site address matches your email address. Not only does it look more professional, but it can also save you a lot of hassle if you need to change your 'real' email address - if, for instance, you run into difficulties with your Hotmail address and want to change to Yahoo (or vice versa), a redirect on your email will mean that all you need to do is to change the address to which the redirect is being sent. Your clients won't need to know that the changeover has taken place. The same would apply if you've been using an email that matches your Internet Service Provider (ISP) - such as a btinternet.com address - and you then change your ISP and lose that email address. Highly inconvenient if you then need to tell everybody about the change.

It's a small detail; but in business, no matter how small or large, it's the details that matter.