How Do You Know This Business is FAKE? — Just because a business has a robust website with lots of information, including a list of people who work at the company, reviews from clients, a physical address, phone numbers and other contact information doesn’t mean the business is legitimate! Our example is Randall’s Shipping Company (RandallShipping.com) We encourage our readers to visit this website and give it your most critical eye! You’ll find a very robust site with latest news going back several years, a blog, multiple offices and contact information, a large team of employees, client reviews and much, much more!  And it is all fake!  Check it out and then continue reading our Top Story. How many red flags can you spot about this business?  We’ve got a long list and will reveal some of them below.

This story begins with a woman named Mary. She received a random email from someone named Mr. Hall, inviting her to apply for a job as a Quality Control Inspector for Randall’s Shipping Company. When Mary replied, she received this email from HR Manager, Sofia Kramer. It came from the email address “office@randallshipping-email.com.” Red flag #1: The domain RandallShipping-Email.com is for sale. It has not been renewed by the company that owns it.

Red flag #2: We asked both Google AND the Better Business Bureau (bbb.org) to tell us what they knew about this LLC and they knew NOTHING. Imagine Google telling you that it cannot even find a business online? This only happens if the website is brand new or is coded so that it tells search engines NOT to gather information about it.

Red Flag #3: We hope you noticed that Randall Shipping has an office in Hong Kong and one in Elizabeth, New Jersey, in a warehouse. However, according to Google Earth and Google search, no such business can be found at the New Jersey address.

Red Flag #4: Did you see on the Randall Shipping website a team of employees?  From the General Manager, Iren Liberman, to the Senior Advisor, Gary Dutcher… every one of them is a FAKE NAME.  The photos were stolen from other websites across the Internet, or purchased from stock image sites, and fake names were slapped on them!  Here are 2 examples…

Red Flag #4: Did you see on the Randall Shipping website a team of employees?  From the General Manager, Iren Liberman, to the Senior Advisor, Gary Dutcher… every one of them is a FAKE NAME.  The photos were stolen from other websites across the Internet, or purchased from stock image sites, and fake names were slapped on them!  Here are 2 examples…

Red Flag #5: Randall Shipping LLC lists several clients’ photos along with wonderfully supportive quotes about the company on a “Testimonials” page. Again, we found that all of these photos were stolen or purchased from across the Internet.  Here are two examples….

Red Flag #6: In their “Latest News” section of their website, Randall Shipping posts articles going back to February, 2018. They even report that they “celebrate the anniversary of the company foundation” on September 11, 2020.  This is quite a leap of faith once you look up their domain in a WHOIS and discover that their website didn’t exist before October, 2021! (We also believe that it is no accident that these cybercriminals who created this website chose 9/11 as the day to “celebrate” because we have reason to believe the people behind these “mule scams” are Russian-speaking, from Russia or Eastern Europe. Read our full article about this scam called Package Shipping Scams.  All together, we found about 25 “red flags” that show this “company” is a fraud. The next time you visit a website for the first time, do a little “due diligence” and ask some basic questions about it.  If you find some things that don’t add up, report it to us and don’t trust that site!

You’re Going to Want to Read This – If you have any kind of online account that MUST text you a code in order to log into the account, then you’re going to want to read this article on Scamadviser describing how cybercriminals are running scams against Apple account holders! The article is called Warning: You Could Lose All Your MetaMask Assets to This Apple ID Phishing Scam In case it wasn’t obvious, scammers are blood-sucking leeches. They don’t care if you are poor or in pain. They don’t care if you are already suffering or struggling. They don’t care if you are old with few assets, or young and naive, trying to start your life. They only care about sucking as much money as they can out of you, leaving you in pain and sometimes with life-long consequences.  Here are two small samples that reflect our assertion.  The first is a 419 scam email from someone named “Dudin Vladimir Vasilyevitch” (but using an email address called “wilson.”) The scammer playing this role is using the war in Ukraine, senselessly caused by Russia, as his scam platform.

How Low Can They Go? – This example concerns the very frightening and emotionally brutal scam known as the “underage girl sext scam.”  Though the use of this scam has decreased SIGNIFICANTLY from the 2017 – 2019 years when we would here from 5-7 men every week who were targeted by this scam, it is still happening. At the end of last week, 3 men contacted us because they were caught up in this scam.  Here is a bogus text, supposedly from a police detective, sent last week to a young man who thought he had been communicating with a 20 year old woman on Tinder. According to the “Detective” she was 17 and underage.  There is no “Detective Jay Hill” with the Baton Rouge Police Department.

We are constantly reminded of the pain inflicted on so many people who contact us. Occasionally, we need to have a laugh and feel better by celebrating the good guys who fight back against these blood-sucking leeches.  Check out these two YouTube videos that do just that!  The first is a video from a channel called Scammer Payback. The man presenting has INSIDE information about a cybercriminal gang in India and uses it to surprise one of the scammers on the phone!  The second video comes from the outstanding investigative reporting at Canada’s CBC Marketplace. The report shows how good hackers exposed illegal call centers and phone scams!  It’s nice to celebrate these wins for the good guys!

We also applaud the effort of scam-baiters like our friend Rob. These people tirelessly, and without any compensation, spend hours of their time every week WASTING the time of online fraudsters to decrease their impact on real victims!  Listen to this recent audio file Rob sent us.  He received an email confirming the purchase of an Apple computer through Amazon.  Except that he had made NO SUCH PURCHASE! (Rob enjoys calling the phishing phone numbers like those we post in Phish Nets.) In the audio file you’ll here an Indian scammer named “Mike Thompson from Amazon” try to convince Rob that a 2nd new Amazon account was opened in his name. (Note: We’ve removed Rob’s personal information and also many pauses in this phone call.) The scammers tell him that they will transfer Rob’s call to his bank so that the bank can stop the charge. THIS IS THE MOST DANGEROUS part of this fraud. Listen to all the personal information they try to gather from Rob. However, about 6 minutes into this call the scammers begin to get suspicious that Rob is playing them like a violin!

Email and Microsoft Passwords Expiring, plus Paypal! – We absolutely love it when scammers target us, such as this funny phish from the Philippines telling us that our password was about to expire! And then check out the phish disguised as an email from Microsoft about the purchase of software called “Firewall defender.”  Except that the email came from a personal Gmail account called “faijulislame15.”

Malicious Gift Cards and Promotions! – Everyone loves to get a gift card or a promotional offer! Especially when these offers come from name-brand stores that provide so many of the things we use every day or week.  Except that NONE of these are real! This $100 Comcast gift card email came from the very definition of a CRAP domain! The link in this “short survey” points to a server in the Netherlands.  Not exactly what you’d expect from Comcast, an American company headquartered in Pennsylvania.

Sometimes cybercriminals have a sense of humor. What else could possibly explain the malicious link in this email that came from a server in Chile? It claims to be represent a promotion for Ace Hardware but the links point to a website called allisgoodforyou[.]org.  TRUST US!  All is NOT good for you if you click this link!

NEVER Open Attachments that End With html, htm or php! – We cannot emphasize enough how dangerous it is to open email attachments that end with DOT-html, DOT-htm or DOT-php!  These kinds of attachments are documents that give instructions to your web browser to do something, such as visit a malware-laden website, download software and install it!  The overwhelming number of legitimate attachments are NOT these types of files.  They are most often pdf files or photos such as jpg or jpeg files. However, scammers will sometimes ask you to click a pdf file that LOOKS LIKE it says pdf in the file name, but ends with “html.” Here is an example of an html file was sent from a server in China. Step away from this sleeping tiger!

M&T Bank and Walmart Gift –Our first text wants you to think it came from a mobile bank service for M&T Bank, headquartered in New York.  But the link you are asked to visit is for a website in Chile called AmandasPet[.]cl! How cute.

Your local Walgreens needs your help and is offering a gift in return. And if you believe that, then we have land to sell you in Atlantis!  Just visit AwsomeGiftsAwait[.]com for your free malware…errr, we mean gift. (Look at their spelling of “awesome!”)

Until next week, surf safely!

Copyright © 2021 The Daily Scam and Scamadviser. All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you
have subscribed to it via Scamadviser.com or thedailyscam.com

Keurenplein 41, UNIT A6311  |  1069CD Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Contact Webmaster