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On 07/02/2012 11:44, Neil Winchurst wrote:
Yesterday a friend told me his tale of woe. He has ordered something from Amazon. Fine, so do many of us. Then he received an email, supposedly from DHL, referring to his order, asking him to click on an attachment. You guessed it, he did just that and his hard disk was trashed. Luckily he does have a backup on an external drive which was not plugged in at the time. But meanwhile he has had to leave his computer with a local computer expert who is trying to sort it all out. So, some thoughts on this. Yes, I know, it is easy to be wise after the event. I do not know if DHL do courier work for Amazon, but even so, they are unlikely to email someone directly. Anyway, how would they know the email address? How did the scammer know about the order anyway? And how did he know my friend's email address? There are some very sad people around. Yes, my friend does use Windows, though I do not know which version. If he had been running Linux would the scam program still have run successfully? I ask this because I could perhaps talk to him about moving to Linux to avoid such problems, if it would indeed be safer, once his computer is sorted. Any comments anyone...? Neil
Hi Neil,I don't think Amazon use DHL as a carrier - although some of their Marketplace sellers may. Secondly, DHL are a big courier company, so the chances of bulk random mails reaching at least one person with an outstanding order from them are not insignificant. The same goes for Amazon, and as we don't definitively know usually how Amazon will be shipping our orders it's fairly easy to make an assumption. I've actually had genuine emails from Amazon regarding tracking deliveries, however they are *always* links in the mail not attachments, and they refer to specific orders I have made - plus they come from Amazon not the courier.
On that note, did the email refer to a *specific* order or just to 'your Amazon order'?
Julian -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq