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THE NEWSLETTER  |  04.16.25  |  V05N10
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Search Engines are Used to Target Victims – 2 Examples

Would you possibly think that the all-powerful, all-knowing Google or Bing search engines could be manipulated into serving as weapons to target you with fraud? Think again because it happens all the time! This week, we have two examples to share with you. The first example has happened to my partner, David, from The Daily Scam, multiple times. Of course, he’s too skilled to fall for this fraud but it is disappointing, each time, to say the least. However, the second example targeted a small agricultural business owner from South Korea. This elderly gentleman fell for this fraud hook, line and sinker, as they say. He lost more than $6200 to this fraud ($2,200 USD & $3,500 Euros), simply because Google (including their Chrome browser), as well as Bing, provide NO valuable information or assessment about the validity of a website to their users, even though that information is readily available online! Join us as we explain what happened to these gentlemen and what Google/Bing should be doing. And if you are an aficionado of quality liquors, such as scotch, tequila or bourbon, you’re going to want to read this story!

My partner, David enjoys high quality liquors, like many people. And, like anyone in search of high quality liquors already knows, they can be very pricy. It isn’t uncommon for a quality bottle to be several hundred dollars or more. Earlier in March, David hopped on Bing.com to look for a particular brand of quality Tequila called Cascazine Tequila. Just as Google does, Bing returned pictures, prices and links to more than 2 dozen online distributors at the top of the browser window.  Nearly all of these 750 ML suggested bottles were priced  between $99 – $120, though one was as low as $80. However, what got David’s immediate attention was a bottle of this Tequila priced at $59.15 from a website called Epilogon.com….

Since this heavily discounted liquor, 40 – 50% lower than nearly all of its peers, was so prominently displayed by Bing’s search engine, what could be wrong? David clicked the link to visit Epilogon.com.  And he immediately noticed that a few things about this epic website seemed a bit off. For example, the price had been listed on Bing as $59.15 but when he arrived on the web page and added this item to his shopping cart, the price was listed as $60.03 for no particular reason. At the bottom of each webpage, the “Legal Business Name” was listed as MONIC PANEK LLC and an oddball email address was shown as MiracleCustomerService@outlook.com rather than an email associated with the website domain, or the business name. When we then looked up their listed business address of 46 Delan Ct., New Hyde Park, NY, we discovered a small single family home and NOT any type of liquor business or warehouse! And then perhaps most bizarre, a search for the company phone number, 323-942-4054, turns up two posts on the BBB.org’s Scamtracker website on May 23 and October 17 of last year, as well as other scam-related websites including a post on Scampulse.com about scam pet supplies last September. In each case, losses appeared to be small, about $60 – $100.

By this time, David knew this site was a fraud and further investigated by visiting the Contact webpage at the epilogon.com online liquor store. He was not surprised to find a new email address listed there that uses a “crap” domain named SafeSales[.]top. This domain was registered on June 29, 2024 by someone in Hong Kong. Oddly, it turns out that epilogon.com was actually registered way back in 2008. However, though the WayBackMachine Internet Archive shows 19 screen captures from this website, there is no website content visible or the archive is so old that it doesn’t have permission to visit this website, on 18 of these 19 screen captures.  ….Until January of 2025! That’s when this domain shows up as an online liquor store.

David’s tequila was clearly not going to be shipped from that small house in New Hyde Park, New York! So where was it coming from? That is, of course, the fraud! It wouldn’t be shipped at all because this business doesn’t exist. Also, based on other similar scam websites, we strongly suspect that his low cost tequila would have also included additional charges like a hefty insurance charge, but only after David paid for his initial order. These bogus charges typically get added on to a low cost bottle after the initial payment is made. Interestingly, the “About Us” page at this scammer’s website twice refers to themselves as “stadthaeuser” (using a lower case s).  What also supports our belief that this website is 100% a fraud is the fact that a search for the “Legal Business Name” of Monika Panek LLC turns up this reference of another scam liquor store website at Scamminder.com. But in this case, the scam liquor website is called Cybersecco[.]com. This liquor store was rated 35/100 last September, 2024 by Scamminder’s AI.  And the final nail into this coffin of fraud is that we discovered someone had posted (on March 31) on Scampulse.com that they were cheated out of $75 for the purchase of a $65 bottle of liquor from Epilogon.com.

Despite Bing’s disappointing ability to keep scam sites from displaying so prominently in David’s search results, he eventually found a delicious and reasonably affordable tequila. And then, completely unrelated, a week later we received a request for help from a businessman in South Korea. The man asked us if, in our opinion, we thought fastlinemsc.com was a real or fake shipping company. It took us no time at all to find evidence that this shipping company was absolutely a fraud, but we wanted to know why he was asking. Typically, fake shipping websites are the tail end of another fraud narrative. Sure enough, he had a story to tell us….

The owner of this small South Korean business told us that they needed to order a large amount of food products and went onto Google to search for them. He quickly found a company that placed high on Google’s list of returns and seemed affordable. It was called BLL Food & Drinks GMBH, using the website bllfooddrinksgmbh.com. On their “About Us” page, BLL Food & Drinks GMBH says “We are a customer-focused business, and our employees are just like our products—built quickly. In a quick-moving, dynamic market where change is the only constant, our expanding Trading competes.” They say their main office is located at Unterdorf 215, 5753 Saalbach Salzburg, Austria. The S. Korean business owner told us that he purchased five metric tons of Sesame Seeds as a trial order from BLL Food & Drinks GMBH company. But he added that he thought it was odd that this wholesale food company required him to use either Westernunion or MoneyGram for the payment transaction. He was not able to make a direct bank transfer or pay by a credit card, both of which are serious red flags! He paid the bill and was told that his product would be shipped to him by Fast Line MSC Shipping Logistics, who uses the website fastlinemsc.com. This shipping company states that it is headquartered in Germany and their documentation shows their address as WANHEIMER STR.90, 40468 DUSSELDORF GERMANY. But our search of this address shows that a different shipping business is located there in Germany, and called Ceva Logistics! (The Ceva Logistics domain was registered long ago in 2006). Also, we could NOT find any business called BLL Food & Drinks GMBH at the Salzburg, Austria address either!

Experience has taught us that when someone is defrauded by a shipping company, it typically means that the other company or person moving materials through the fake shipping company is actually also a fraud! As you might expect, BLL Food & Drinks GMBH is a scammer’s website and used to trick buyers. However, unlike any other scam we’ve investigated, this fraud pretends to be an agricultural wholesaler and targets businesses! When we conducted a search for information about this company, we were surprised to find that this fake company was advertising on Alibaba.com. But, a website called Global Sources also posted a warning about this company. (See screenshot below.) (Globalsources.com is an online B2B marketplace and sourcing platform that connects buyers and suppliers worldwide, according to Google.)

In fact, there are many warning signs on the internet about this bogus wholesale company if you take the time to look. For example…

If you look at their Contact Us webpage at bllfooddrinksgmbh.com, you’ll see that it says they were founded in 2011. Then why is it that their domain was registered in January, 2023? Also, they show a free Gmail address on their Contact page which is very odd for a professional company to do.

You may recall that the South Korean businessman didn’t realize that he was being scammed until after he paid the shipping company Fast Line MSC Shipping Logistics to ship the 5 metric tons of seeds! And he had already purchased these seeds from BLL Food & Drinks GMBH. He told us “After they received all of money from us, they do not receive our call and never reply from email.”  The shipping company was part of this fraud! It turns out that this bogus shipping company was already listed amongst the hundreds of fake shipping companies on our website at: https://www.thedailyscam.com/fake-shipping-companies/

(NOTE: If you visit our list of fake shipping companies, use Control-F (on a PC) or Command-F (on a Mac) and enter fastlinemsc to jump down to that listing.)

This financial loss could have been avoided if the businessman had done a bit of investigating before trusting these new companies. However, and not uncommon, he also told us that he is “old” and not terribly skilled at using the Internet.

It’s important to circle back to the most important point of these examples of fraud. The whole point of this article was to bring attention to the fact that online fraud is so much easier for scammers because search engines, like Google and Bing, don’t provide ANY built-in, automatic resources to identify fraud or suspicious websites as a part of their search results!  This is NOT acceptable in today’s age of explosive online fraud! And, with their development of AI tools, this should be exceptionally easy to incorporate into search results! (Think of Google’s AI results that often appear at the top of page 1 results.)  For example….

  • Search engines should automatically look up the age and other information about a website domain to show to people.  Younger domains should immediately be flagged as suspicious. AI should crawl a website and report inconsistencies with a company’s founding date and domain age, such as “founded in 2011” but registered in 2024!
  • Search engines should automatically include score reports from several anti-scam tools such as those we’ve mentioned above! They should offer a warning in their Google listing if their own AI tools also finds a website domain name is listed on a site reporting fraud, such as on websites like ours, or Scamtracker at BBB.org.
  • Search engines should automatically include low trust ratings from sites like Yelp, Trustpilot, BBB.org, and of course Google reviews. AND, if there are no reviews at all found by their AI tools, that should be reported as well since it could be a warning sign, especially if a website is more than a year old!

It is a completely new and dangerous Internet era as a result of the massive worldwide explosion of online fraud! We must demand that the companies that produce everyday tools used to connect with and search the internet step up and provide better protections for consumers around the world!

REMINDER: There are many more fake online businesses that turn up in a Google or Bing search. Scamadviser recently posted an article about anoth fake store, selling products at absurdly cheap prices…

   https://www.scamadviser.com/articles/is-cheapeststoreru-legit-or-a-scam

About pricing, if it seems too good to be true, it is!

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Factual Information in Times of Uncertainty, Social Media Posts about Voting Rights & More!

To say “we live in uncertain times” almost sounds cliche today. But I am certain that many Americans, and citizens in other countries, think the world today feels less safe, predictable and reliable than it did even 10-15 years ago. The current Tariff war from the United States government and its impact on global markets, the literal war in Ukraine by Russia, along with it’s alleged proxy targets across Europe, severe storms from climate change, as well as the veritable deluge of misinformation/disinformation campaigns in social media and elsewhere, all contribute to this feeling of unease, uncertainty and insecurity. It’s sometimes hard to know where to look for the truth about what is happening around us. As the Content Director for TheDailyScam.com, a blog focused on exposing online fraud, dilineating truth from fiction online is extremely important. Many times, I find myself reading something and wondering “is this accurate? Is this true?” Or am I being manipulated by bias, misinformation or a targeted disinformation campaign? A recent example came up last week when one of my friends reposted something on Facebook that appears to have originated by a group called The Guardians of Democracy.  It said, in the United States “8 in 10 married women have changed their surname which means they don’t have a birth certificate that matches their current legal name. 69 million women have to get new IDs to vote under the SAVE Act. The GOP is trying to silence women across the country.” I personally found this post to be very concerning. The SAVE Act appears to have originated from very Conservative members of our Congress as a result of unproven theories that voting in the United States is littered with fraud. However, other than a handful of proven cases of voter fraud, there has never been any factual basis with evidence supporting any of these claims, going back years including the 2020 election.

When I first saw this social media post on April 11 about the SAVE Act, it resonated with my understanding of the very right-leaning push to restrict elections across the United States. But again, I wondered, is this post accurate? It turns out that this post is true in part, BUT it is also misleading!  I then read this outstanding article on FactCheck.org titled Will SAVE Act Prevent Married Women from Registering to Vote? (Published February, 28, 2025). According to the FactCheck article, although some women will absolutely be impacted negatively by the SAVE Act as it is currently written, an overwhelming majority will not because they already have other acceptable forms of identification that are allowed by the SAVE Act, such as a US Passport, a government-issued photo ID, or a REAL ID Driver’s License. (A “REAL ID” is required nationally by May 7 for anyone wishing to fly domestically on all commercial aircraft.) Also, in order to vote, veterans and members of the US Military can show a US Military ID but only if it is shown with a military record of service that also shows the United States as the applicant’s birthplace. And, according to the FactCheck article, there are many other ways that people can prove citizenship that vary by State. My point here is that yes, the SAVE Act will likely make it very difficult for some women to vote due to unfair demands and restrictions! However, it likely isn’t anywhere near the 69 million voters as suggested in the Facebook post. For example, it is reasonable to believe that many of these American women will have either a US Passport or a REAL ID for their Driver’s License. (According to 2022 Statistic Reports, there were about 68.45 million married women living in the United States at that time. And according to other credible sources, including our own government, by early 2025 about 45-50% of Americans had valid US Passports. So it is reasonable to assume that many of the currently married 69 million American women have valid US passports! And, as previously stated, a driver’s license that is also a REAL ID is very likely held by millions of married woman across the US, especially with the May 7th deadline looming for those who wish to use domestic air travel.) 

Regardless of the actual number, the fact that any American citizen, might lose her or his right to vote because of a poorly written, possibly biased, SAVE Act is wrong. And this is especially true if this right is lost because a woman simply chose to follow traditional marriage naming conventions! Fortunately, the SAVE Act has not yet been voted into law. And the outstanding article on Factcheck.org can help women understand if they will still be able to vote should it become law, and what steps they must take to protect their voting rights. Given how important voting rights are to our American Democracy, we encourage you to share this information with friends and family. Fraud refers to intentionally deceiving someone. Though it is usually carried out for someone else’s financial gain, all too often it is also carried out as a way to falsely manipulate others, sway their way of thinking, or to diminish their rights and abilities. 

Today, more than ever, it is critically important to check facts before you believe information that may have consequences and implications in your lives! I have several important recommendations to help people navigate through all the noise and distractions. I have been visiting these sites for years and have found them to be extremely truthful and reliable, as already noted in my evaluation of the SAVE Act Facebook post. These websites, listed below, have helped me to see through online bias, misinformation and fraud. When you see news or information that seems biased, or feels unimaginable, or that is spreading across social media from unknown sources, STOP for a moment! Before you believe what you see, or pass it on to others, consider using these resources to help you understand if what you are reading/seeing is true or if it is heavily biased, left or right:

    “Debunking Viral Claims” on Social Media such as Facebook (with links to multiple articles)

(NOTE: A valuable search method you can use to search for specific content on these websites above is to use the “Site:” command in Google. This short YouTube video explains how to do this.)

Our friend Rob continues to get emails from beautiful women from Eastern Europe. We can’t help but notice that many (most?) of these women who are randomly looking for love online claim to be from Ukraine. Given the horrible tragedy of Russia’s war against Ukraine, can you blame them? But when we discovered that a supposedly Ukrainian woman, named Inesa, also recently posted to a text thread on a Russian website, in Russian, we had to wonder if she was lying to Rob about her home country! Russia has brutallly and unfairly destroyed so much of Ukraine, killing thousands of innocent women, children and men. Why would a young, beautiful Ukranian woman feel OK about chatting on a Russian website?  It certainly feels odd to us, just like her willingness to reach out to a man who could be her father’s age….

Other worthwhile articles about online fraud recently include…

Malwarebytes recently published some interesting articles that may interest our readers. They include…

Tax fraud targeting Americans typically explodes at this time of the year. This year is no different! Check out this recent example of a tax scam meant to phish your login credentials…

https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/04/urgent-reminder-tax-scam-wants-to-phish-your-microsoft-credentials

Phishermen are increasingly using QR codes as their means to target victims:

https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/04/qr-codes-sent-in-attachments-are-the-new-favorite-for-phishers

Parents of young children sometimes use tracking services to keep tabs on where their kids are. But what if these tracking services messed up and start showing you random photos and locations of other children? How would that make you feel about the data associated with your own children? Apparently, this is alleged to have happened to a tracking service called SyncUp from T-Mobile:

https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/04/location-name-and-photos-of-random-kids-shown-to-parents-in-child-tracker-mix-up

Unfortunately, people’s official IDs are sometimes stolen or lost. And sometimes people are tricked into giving copies of their IDs to fraudsters around the globe. But could you ever guess that a stolen/missing ID could result in ruining a man’s life because the thief added a criminal record to the victim’s life? Check out this crazy story about a young man impacted by this event….

https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/03/this-fraud-destroyed-my-life-man-ends-up-with-criminal-record-after-id-was-stolen

Oh, the cleverness of scammers! Would you believe that some have tricked people to click a link while in a Zoom call that results in malware being installed on their computers? Check out this article on Scamadviser…

https://www.scamadviser.com/articles/hackers-are-hijacking-zoom-calls-dont-click-that-link

Could you imagine that foreigners with the proper authority to live and work in the UK are also scamming their own citizens in their home countries through job scams?  BBC Reporters even caught an African Doctor running this scam while working in the UK! Visit: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1en4dx7yn9o

We Appreciate Your Order, Suspicious Signin, & Docusign

Our first smelly phish this week was sent recently to an accountant. This email doesn’t even inform the person about WHAT was ordered! But it came from someone named Charlotte Jones at her domain macanimut[.]org and the link in this clickbait points to a perfectly and sensibly named website called MySStamentProfile[.]de. What, you say? Is that short for “my statement profile?” First of all, that misspelled website was registered just 10 days ago and in Germany! (“.de” = Deutschland = Germany). Sadly, Charlotte’s domain, macanimut[.]org has already been identified as a phishing fraud. Delete, but we appreciate your effort.

In case you didn’t know, Coinbase is a cryptocurrency exchange. This next rotten phish clearly wants you to believe it was sent by Coinbase Support but that name was simply entered into the text field of the FROM address. This rotten phish was sent from a sheet metal company’s server in Australia!  Not from coinbase.com. So don’t bother calling them at 844-292-1971 because it’s just another scammer phone number! HOWEVER, if you care to pull out your noise-canceling headphones and Airhorn can, please call them often!

Yes, this third smelly phish did actually come from Docusign.net, a legitimate company website. But that doesn’t make the content legitimate! Scammers simply created a fake Docusign account and then created a fake document and sent out emails by the thousands using bogus information in the email notes field! You didn’t have a recent cryptocurrency purchase on your Paypal account. But you DID have a scammer try to trick you into calling them at 866-483-8573.  Do you have your Airhorn can ready?

Remember to report your smelly phish to us and Google!

https://safebrowsing.google.com/safebrowsing/report_phish/

Luxury Watches & Your Netflix Membership Has Expired

Thinking of Russia just warms the heart, doesn’t it? One of our readers shared this awesome email and website with us about “Luxury Watches for Only $250!” Guess where this website is located? That’s right, Russia! The website domain name is such a crazy, nonsensical mix of letters that we can’t begin to imagine how to pronounce it! Maybe it’s time for some Russian language lessons? According to this WHOIS record, this crazy-name website was registered on August 28, 2024. With prices as much as 90% off, are we worried about anything going wrong about this great deal? Hell yes! VirusTotal shows multiple security services saying that this website is malicious!

Oh no! Your Netflix membership has expired! How will we ever finish The Residence or The Long Island Serial Killer! **GASP**  But before you click that link, we hope you’ll notice that this email didn’t come from netflix.com and the link certainly doesn’t point to it! In fact, the link points to a link-shortening service. (NOTE: Everything after the # symbol, including the “#” symbol itself, is not important and can be discarded if you wish to unshorten a link using tools like Unshorten.it or Urlex.org.) When we unshortened that link, we discovered that we’ll be redirected to a malicious website called jobsacik[.]com.  LUNGE for the delete key!

New Document Shared with with you & New Incoming Voice Message

OK, we say it over and over….and it’s true! DETAILS MATTER! Check out this email sent to an accounting firm. In the big, bright, blue box it says “New Document Shared with with you.”  And this email wants you to think it came from Docusign??  That’s that’s nonsense! However, what we DID find interesting about this very malicious clickbait is that the very looooooong link to “Access Document” actually contained, not one, but TWO redirects! To make it easier for you to see how redirects are built into some links, check out the screenshot below. If you see another “http” or “https” inside of a link (rather than at the start of a link), it means you’re going to be redirected to a different website than you think. In this link, you are first led to believe that you’ll be visiting the click-tracking service at awstrack[.}me.  But that is followed by a redirect to a website in Canada called qc[.]ca. Except…SURPRISE, you’ll actually be redirected to a website in Brazil called fortelengenharia[.]com[.]br where malware eagerly waits for your arrival!

As if the above email wasn’t bad enough, here’s a lovely malicious clickbait that one of our readers sent us recently. It pretended to be a “new incoming voice” message from Comcast, spelled: C O M-CAST.  Right. Like that spelling would never arouse suspicions that this tomfoolery could be malicious! Of course the link saying “Go to x:finity voice here” doesn’t point to either Xfinity or Comcast! Delete!

Apple Approval Notice, We Have an Opening, and DMV Unpaid Bill

When an email from an oddball Hotmail account arrives in your text messages claiming to be an Apple Approval Notice, swipe left and hit DELETE! Trust us when we say that there is NO pre-authorized charge on any of your accounts! So, unless you have your Airhorn can and noise-cancelling headphones ready, DO NOT call these scammers at 888-374-5054.

Ahhhhhh……. Lily, Lily, Lily! You’re not listening to me! Why, oh why, won’t you read my responses to your recent job offer? And yet, over a five hour period you kept coming back with new texts to get my attention.  Oh well. Your lack of interest in my responses simply means that I must block your phone number. Somehow, I’m sure I’ll hear from you again using another bogus number soon…

These bogus toll payment texts are driving everyone nuts! (**EYEROLL**) As if you didn’t already know, the real EZ Pass Toll Service will NEVER text you for something like this even if you had an unpaid fine! And certainly not from a random, bizarre iCloud email account!

Deeeeeeeleeeeeeete!

Until next week, surf safely!

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