Who do you plan to warn? And who will you report to? IMO, unless I get a phishing email that is trying to claim to be from a bank or credit card company or other big shopping or financial institution, etc that has an easy way to report a phishing or spoof, I just ignore and delete it.
Please don’t “contact” all your contact list. If we got that from everyone who gets one of those letters, we 'd never find real email.
It’s like that stupid hoax FB private message that gives irrational advice to send it to everyone else. Just don’t. don’t. don’t!!!
Also, how do you all even see this scam stuff. It goes to spam (or possibly Promotions tab,) and I never even see it to worry about.
Some spam slips through my filter.
Once again, OP, this is a VERY common scam that is seriously not worth a second of your worry. You are obsessing over it way too much. I’m just surprised this is the first time you have seen it.
My contacts? If they have a list of my contacts and if they are trying to send a malware. IDK if that’s the case. Report is to the email provider. No idea if it does anything.
It is deleted when I reported phishing. This is the first “blackmail” email I got. I get tons of phishing email notably from “Apple” and “Amazon”. Not blackmail.
@garland You must have a good email service that filters out well. These things get through the filter and sometime they send an important mail to spam. Did I hear AI is not very intelligent?
Ugh, don’t know why we are all not getting through to you. They won’t email your contacts. And even if they did, your contacts would not give it a second thought. What do you think they would do? Post about it on Facebook? “Iglooo watches porn! OMG! He’s scum!” ?
Separate issue, but the question reminds me of a situation where I did in fact report a situation and take an issue to the mat. I ordered something on line from a website I had not used before, and discovered immediately upon paying (they insisted on using paypal- maybe that should have been a flag) that it was likely a fraud. I tried to cancel immediately, contacted both paypal and the credit card company, did some subsequent research and discovered that the site was in fact a scam and there were, in the days after I ordered, other reports of people being taken by this fake company.
I reported to paypal that they were allowing a scammer to use their site, and, to make a long story short, was also able to get the Supervisor at the local PO involved, and filed a formal complaint with the postal inspection service (or whoever it gets filed with) for mail fraud (long story that is beyond the scope of this post, but I had evidence of mail fraud).
Paypal did not refund my $, but after 2 rounds of disputes with my credit card, they did credit me back my $. The website was taken down within a few weeks of when it went live, but sadly many other people apparently were also victims. That one did fry my cookies (as they say) and I persisted as far as I could. No clue if the perpetrators got arrested for mail fraud (part of the scam was out of CA, the rest was from China). There was a bit of an entertainment component to dogging this. And I did get my $ back. I hope the victims who spent a lot more than I did also got a refund from their cr card companies Paypal was useless.
I have gmail. Maybe i’m just lucky. Honestly never see these (except if I check for them)
But yes to the bigger question: they DO NOT have your contacts. This is part of the scam.
@jym626 You DID save many other potential victims. That’s what is important. I think everyone should take time and report scam. If more people report, it will be easier to pin down perpetuators and hopefully slow them down. Scammers change their face all the time and comes up with new.
Actually, I am sure they do have my contacts and yours, too. It is not that hard.
If I had been wiser and looked up reviews on that company before I ordered (lesson learned) I would have known better. The site trustpilot.com was very helpful and thats where a lot of people posted what happened to them (all pretty similar). But I didn’t email anyone personally to tell them to stay away from this company. Some other victims posted what they did that may have all contributed to getting the site shut down fairly quickly. If they had spammed me, I would have ignored it.
You facilitated shutting them down. That helps. This was the first time I got a blackmail. Often, it is a fraudulent invoice from Apple or Amazon. Or these days it is Amazon sending me gifts only if I fill out xyz. I forward them to Apple or Amazon. I could just delete and not bother but I was naive once and figure there may be some who are still naive. It takes effort to send fraudulent mail. Scammers got clever. These days, they won’t let you forward unless their address is altered. I have to include how to reconstruct their original URL. They need that to track them down.
Well, it obviously was a successful email because mine was at least a year ago!
A year ago? Took a while to find me!