More Scammy Emails

Were you an Internode customer who transferred your email account to The Messaging Company?

Be careful of a dodgy email starting “Hi,” but without your name, purporting to be from The Messaging Company asking you to complete a survey or click a link to “recover lost emails”.

Do not trust it.

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Clickbait.

Facebook is becoming more unusable by the day.

A recent trend that has become very annoying is where a post shows an elaborate, intricate, obviously AI-generated, sculpture, statue, painting, portrait, carving or suchlike, even a magnificent cake or a horse made of bread, with an unlikely-looking creator standing next to it and a caption saying something like “Do you think I can get any likes for this?” or in the third person, “He/she did all this work, why is nobody talking about it?” The post then has hundreds of comments, mostly along the lines of “Oh, wow! What amazing talent!”, “God has blessed you with such skill” and “The whole world should see her work, let’s all share it far and wide”.

It’s all nonsense, of course, and most are scams. Some are trying to provoke as many responses as possible in order to generate input to help train AI language models. Others are share- and like-farming scams, just like the posts with pictures that play on the emotions of kind and thoughtful people, for example pictures that depict an abused dog or a disabled child and ask you to ‘like’ or ‘share’ the post to wish the subject of the picture well.

When such a page has received thousands of ‘likes’ or shares, the page will be sold to marketers or ads placed on the page to display to the thousands of users who, by liking, sharing or commenting have inadvertently signed up as fans.

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Loot !

Isn’t it nice of Patrick to go to all that trouble (see below) to recover all that money for me from around the world? I’d been wondering lately where it had got to. Oh, and I’ve obscured Mr Anderson’s contact details because I don’t want anyone else getting in first and snaffling the loot.

Hello, this Patrick Anderson from the USA department of treasury Washington DC, this is to let you know that a ton of money up to 20 million dollars has been recovered across Africa, Europe and America to your name. I’m pleased to inform you that this funds will be released to you through bank wire transfer, cashiers check, cash delivery as soon as we hear from you.
Congratulations to you as i await your response,contact
…………..@…….com or 202-xxx-xxx
Thank you.
Patrick Anderson

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Workshop

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Security!

I never knew I had my own Security Team!

My word, these folk are good, going to the trouble of emailing me from my own website domain to tell me that there is something wrong with my email account, with a nice, big juicy link tempting me to click it (all links deactivated in the exact copy below).

Or maybe I’m emailing myself to warn myself of a problem with my own email that I’m using to send and receive the warning.

Dear ianshort.com,

Your account will be disconnected from sending or receiving mails from other users.Because you failed to resolve errors on your mail.

You need to resolve the errors or your account will be disconnect
Follow the instruction below to resolve now.

CLICK HERE TO RESOLVE ISSUE NOW

Regards,
ianshort.com Security Team
ianshort.com | Support | Privacy Policy
Copyright © 2024 ianshort.com Inc

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AI Rocks !

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Existential Oven

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Concert

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Driving Challenge?

Just saw a fascinating display of innovative driving technique.

As I slowed down at some traffic lights, another car cruised past in the adjacent lane.

The driver was bracing the steering wheel with his knees while holding a box of instant noodles in one hand and eating them with chopsticks in the other.

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Learning to Write

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