THE NEWSLETTER | 07.22.26 | V06N24
Co-Founder/Content: Doug Fodeman | Co-Founder/Creative: David Deutsch | Scambaiter: Rob M
We Helped a Woman & a US Business Avoid Scams!
Our mission to educate the public about online fraud and phone fraud is based on the simple fact that we are here to help people. That’s what we do, and we’ve been doing it for years. Here are two small, but important, recent examples of the help we provide to people. The first concerns an older woman who was looking for friendship through a dating site. But it wasn’t the woman who reached out to us. It was a good friend of hers who was concerned about the woman’s new online relationship. The second example concerned a small Texas business that makes custom signs, graphics and banners. Someone reached out to their business last week to inquire about a large purchase of more than 80 banners. However, the person asked that the invoice for the banners include the cost for a shipping company of the customer’s choosing. As you can imagine, this was a very strange request. The Texas company asked us if we thought this shipping company was legitimate. To support both scam narratives, the criminals behind them had created fake business websites. We were able to show both the woman’s friend and the business enough evidence of fraud to help them decide to leave these supposed opportunities behind. In the case of the older woman, her new love interest claimed to work for a company called Zynergy Energy. The critical question for you is…. Would you have been able to see through these scams? And, if so, would you have seen all the signs of fraud we found?
To protect the woman’s identity, we’ll call her Audrey. (We have specifically been asked not to identify the dating app, time frame or any other details about her, other than she is a Senior.) Audrey met a man on a dating app who identified himself as Michael White, the Chairman and CEO of a company called Zynergy Energy (zynergeyenergy.com). Michael showed her indications that he was very wealthy. For example, he told Audrey that he owned a $4 Million dollar home in a wealthy New York area. As you can see in the photo below, copied from the site’s Leadership webpage, Michael White is a handsome, older man. As for Zynergy Energy, their top page at zynergyenergy.com, states that “Zynergy Energy is an internationally focused engineering enterprise with world-class capabilities spanning the entire client value chain. We operate an integrated business model comprising the full range of engineering, construction and asset management services delivering single-source solutions for some of the world’s most prestigious public and private organisations.”
If you were to crawl the ZynergyEnergy.com website, you’ll likely find it impressive in many ways, including their effort to attract young workers and increase diversity of their employees! On their website is a section titled “Responsibility” under which there are multiple pages, such as Environment, People, Health & Safety, and even a page called Modern Slavery. For example, on their People page they wrote the following….
ATTRACTING YOUNG PEOPLE
To hedge against skills gaps we are working with schools and colleges to inspire more young people to consider careers in construction. Through a combination of learning experiences and vocational guidance, our project teams help students make informed career choices by providing an exciting insight into the many different roles our industry offers.
At the same time we are investing in world-class education – not only to grow our own talent but, more broadly, to help build the skills our industry will need to meet future engineering challenges profitably and sustainably.
Our global network of academic partnerships includes some of the world’s most renowned institutions. Working with the University of Cambridge and Imperial College London, for example, we have developed two unique masters degrees. Open to applicants around the world, the programmes seek to develop the next generation of industry innovators, challenging candidates to rethink current practices.
ENCOURAGING DIVERSITY
Construction and engineering is still regarded as a predominantly male domain. Yet we cannot resolve the skills gap without addressing this imbalance. We must work harder to encourage diversity in all its forms – or risk seriously restricting the pool of talent we have to choose from.
We recently began monitoring ethnic diversity through our employee profiling system. We also track gender ratios across the business – with particular attention on our high-potential talent programmes.
OH MY GOSH! Don’t you just want to give this CEO, Michael White a hug and say thank you for being so kind and considerate?! That is, until you dig a little deeper into the details on this website, starting with the photo of Michael White, Chairman and CEO of Zynergy Energy. We find it very suspicious that the link on their site that points directly to that image actually contains the name Stewart McIntyre! Here is the link: zynergyenergy.com/dcc/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/14100_stewart_mcintyre860×484-300×169.jpg. Why would Michael White’s photo be named Stewart McIntyre? When we conducted a reverse image search of Michael White’s photo, Google showed us an identical photo but of an Environmental Journalist from Spain named Rafa Ruiz. You can see this same photo used as Zynergy Energy’s CEO is named Señor Ruiz’s photo in the pdf file in this link. `
There are sooooo many suspicious signs of fraud on the Zynergy Energy website. Below is a list of some of them, most of which we shared with Audrey’s friend who had contacted us. He, of course, shared the list with her. The friend told us that Audrey was actually relieved to hear that Michael White was likely a scammer, if you can imagine that! She said that he had been especially annoying recently. She said he texted her about ten times one day and saying “Hey beautiful!” Here is a partial list of suspicious red flags of fraud…
- Zynergy Energy uses Meta tags, like nearly all websites, to share information with search engines. Their Meta tag says “Zynergy Energy has been delivering sustainable, high-performance engineering and construction services for over a century and a half.” Wow! That’s a long time in business! Why then was their zynergyenergy.com website for this multi-million dollar company registered on November 17, 2025, less than 8 months before it came to our attention,. And it was registered using Namecheap, a favorite Registrar of cybercriminals, in our opinion.
- The Zynergy Energy website shows icons for LinkedIn and Facebook social media accounts but these links don’t point to any specific accounts. They just point to the social media services themselves.
- The website says this company is located in San Diego, CA but it offers no street address anywhere on the website’s many pages that we reviewed, including their Contact page and top page. (As of 7/16/26)
- It appears to us that some of the content on the zynergyenergy.com website was stolen from a UK company called Laing O’Rourke. For example, the Human Rights and Modern Slavery statements found on Zynergy Energy were likely taken and slightly modified from statements on the Laing O’Rourke website. Another example of stolen content concerns an “Independent Assurance” statement that appears on the Governance page of the zynergyenergy.com website. Look at the link construction at the top of this graphic that was found on this zynergyenergy.com governance page. It clearly shows the domain name for Laing O’Rourke in the Zynergy link, though we cannot find that exact graphic currently on the LO website.
Also, it appears that Zynergy Energy may not be the only fake business website used by the scammer behind this fraud and who connected with Audrey. We found lots of evidence of two other highly suspicious construction businesses that were connected to Zynergy Energy. They are…
- Blitz Steel, using the domain blitzsteel.com. It was registered nearly 8 years ago in August, 2018. Though Blitz Steel website has been around for nearly 8 years, we believe it is a fraud for several reasons. The website is nearly identical to Zynergy Energy. Interestingly, the website coding used to create the ZynergyEnergy.com website is littered with hundreds of references to the blitzsteel.com website! If you copy and paste into your web browser this exact source code link (in bold): view-source:https://zynergyenergy.com/dcc/ it should show you the source code for the top of their webpage. Then hit Control-F or Command-F (depending on your type of computer) and search for the word blitzsteel. On July 16, we did this and found 58 references in the source code on the Zynergy Energy webpage for the name BlitzSteel! Also, when we conduct a Google search for some of the content found on the Zynergy Energy website, Blitz Steel also comes up in the Google search results! Some of our readers may think that perhaps the scammers behind Zynergy Energy stole the website content from Blitz Steel’s website. But the BlitzSteel.com website also shows other signs of fraud. For example, on their Leadership webpage, there is a black & white photo of Viktor Munich, Deputy Chairman and Co-Founding Director of Blitzsteel Constructions [sic]. However, a reverse image search of this photo shows that this photo (in color) is found in a Condolence Book for Des O’Rourke on RIP.ie. Mr. Des O’Rourke’s photo can also be found on the legitimate UK site ConstructionWave. (Mr. Des O’Rourke was the founder of the Laing O’Rourke business mentioned earlier.) Another photo on the Leadership page of BlitzSteel.com shows the photo of a man named Alexander Sheffield, Managing Director. However, we were easily able to uncover that the photo used for Alexander was actually that of Paul Sheffield, the former CEO of Tier Group. (Here are many Google photos of Paul Sheffield.) It’s also important to note that the domain blitzsteel.com was registered by someone named Tyler Grey. Tyler Grey entered his address into the domain registration as 7736 Dumfries Rd, Manassas, VA. However, Google tells us that there is no #7736 on Dumfries Road in Manassas, VA.
• Vomedra Constructions [sic] – Vomedra used to have a website at vomedragroup[.]com but that domain is no longer registered and valid (as of 7/16/26). The domain vomedra[.]com also appears to be associated with this business but it is also no longer registered (as of 7/16/26). Both domains had originally been registered 9 years ago. But this business still has a LinkedIn page claiming that their primary address is 2324 S Grand Ave, Los Angeles, California 90007, US. However, two online sources via a Google search tell us that this is the address for a women’s clothing store. Also, their LinkedIn page says this is a construction business with between 1000-5000 employees. And yet, there are only 3 profiles on LinkedIn that include this company name. (We were unable to visit any of these 3 profiles to further investigate them. They are somehow private.) The Vomedra Construction LinkedIn account shows a whopping 14 followers as of 7/16/26, though they claim to have been founded in 1999 and say they are “one of the world’s major project development and construction groups.” As of 7/16/26, their LinkedIn page had no posts and had not ever purchased any Ads. Also, a search for Vomedra reviews and complaints on Google turned up, essentially, nothing! Finally, the California Secretary of State offers a business search feature for registered businesses in the state. We visited it and searched for Vomedra. No results were found. And finally, the Vomedra name can be found on the Zynergy Energy website!
We hope you’ll agree with us that Zynergy Energy is a fraud, as likely are both the Blitz Steel and Vomedra Constructions [sic] businesses. Thankfully, Audrey agreed with her friend and cut off all contact with the scammer pretending to be Michael White. As for the Texas business we helped last week, they informed us that their company was contacted by a prospective customer who requested a quotation for the supply of 80 promotional banners. The Texas business emailed the quote. However, shortly afterward, this business received a reply accepting the quote but requesting that the order quantity be increased from 80 to 160 banners! That should have been great news to hear for a small business. However, the customer also requested that this company connect directly with the customer’s shipping company and include the shipping charges in their invoice for the banner order. That request was highly unusual. In fact, the woman who contacted us said “Several aspects of the transaction raised concerns. The customer used a Gmail email address rather than a business email, despite claiming the order was for a new Treasure Island resort opening in Hawaii, where he also stated he resides.” She also added “We also conducted a Google search but were unable to find any information about a new Treasure Island opening in Hawaii, which further increased our suspicion.” The business then contacted us for our opinion about Logistics Express Company, which uses the domain logisticsexpresscompany.com. We are 100% confident that this shipping company, using the domain logisticsexpresscompany.com, is a fraud and here’s why….
1. The domain, logisticsexpresscompany.com, was registered less than 7 months ago, on January 20, using a proxy service to hide the person who registered it. Why wasn’t the domain registered directly to the business name itself?
2. VirusTotal.com has 1 security service that identifies this business as suspicious and Scam-Detector.com finds this business as suspicious and unsafe (22 out of 100 score) – as of 7/14/2026.
3. This shipping company shows their address as 4651 121st, Urbandale, IA 50323. But this is the address of the REAL shipping company called Express Logistics Inc, (Here is the Dun & Bradstreet information about this real company). This real company uses the domain exp-logistics.com which was registered waaaay back in 2003! ( https://www.whois.com/whois/exp-logistics.com )
4. The website logisticsexpresscompany.com has been reported as a fraud to the Better Business Bureau scam tracker website. Additionally, the man who contacted this Texas business gave his name as Dean Anderson, using the delivery address of 520 Makauea St, Honolulu, HI 96819. This address has also been reported exactly one month ago to the Better Business Bureau scam tracker website as being used in fraud!
- The Testimonials that appears on the Logistics Express Company website are fake. For example there is a testimonial by a man’s name “Robert Thompson” but the photo presented is that of a woman. The other two testimonials, using different quotes and names, but show the same photo.
- None of the four social media icons on the Logistics Express Company website point to anything at all. They are just eye candy. In fact, many of the links on the logisticsexpresscompany.com website do not work!
We could go on and on presenting suspicious details about this shipping business, and Dean Anderson’s Hawaii address, but we think you’ll agree with our conclusion that this is also a scammer’s attempt to target a small American business. We advised the business to stay away from this fraudster and to contact us anytime they felt suspicious or uncertain about the legitimacy of someone, or some business placing an order.
Latest Stats on Scam Sources, plus Scam Threats, Winners & Losers…
If you’ve been reading our newsletters for a long time, you probably have a pretty good idea of the countries around the world that seem to host the most active cybercriminals targeting citizens in the US, UK and Australia. While specific data about these cybercriminals groups is hard to pinpoint, and can change from year to year, several countries always seem to be in the top 10, if not top five! For example, India, China and Nigeria are always considered in the top group, but the top 10 list also usually includes Russia and the USA itself! Also, the full list of top scammer countries can vary depending on who is doing the study/reporting and the research year. (Here is a 2025 sample source on AnalyticsInsight.net.) However, a statistic that is undeniable is that the amount of fraud targeting Americans has risen significantly post-COVID! According to the well-respected PEW Research Center, 73% of all adults in the US have been targeted by scammers! The PEW research center published an eye-opening article about their research, titled Online Scams and Attacks in America Today almost exactly a year ago and it is worth reading! (e.g. Americans age 30 – 49 years old reported the highest number of scam attacks, compared to all other age groups. And while older adults tend to suffer higher financial losses, it is actually younger adults, age 18-29, who reported losses most often.) As you would expect, most Americans say that these attacks are now a serious problem that needs to be better addressed. And, according to the PEW Research study, most Americans think that tech companies and our government are not doing enough to combat these threats. We agree! That’s why we strongly believe that anti-fraud education, such as we offer, is critically important! Please consider inviting your friends and family to sign up for our free newsletter and to visit our site. And if your company or organization is interested in a 90 minute training workshop with us, contact us at workshop@thedailyscam.com.
We have good news and bad news to report. First the good news! Once again, last week I was contacted by a beautiful young woman, this time named Juliana. She immediately said it was nice to meet me and wondered what kind of music I liked because I have music on my profile page. That was fascinating to hear because I don’t recall writing anything about music in my profile. I checked it again. No music mentioned. Nada! Needless to say, the conversation went no further. Since I created a public profile page in a MeetUp group, I’ve now been personally contacted 5 times, all by beautiful young woman. Wow, I was never a “chick magnet” in my youth! I wonder what changed now in my senior years?
Now the bad news. We’ve heard from two different readers recently that they had both received similar threatening emails from hackers who claimed they had gained access to their personal devices and recorded embarrassing videos of the men. (You can likely fill in the blank what the extortionist was talking about.) But both emails were empty lies! The first extortionist asked the man to pay him $10 MILLION dollars not to expose what he had supposedly collected! This man doesn’t have anywhere NEAR $10 Million!! Again, thankfully, both men realized this extortion was a fraud and reported it to us! (NOTE: the first threat claims that the man’s computer was breached by a router security vulnerability. These vulnerabilities are real! Here are 2 articles about these types of threats: Fox Business and BGR.com reports that 5 Tenda routers are vulnerable to attack. It would be wise to log into your home’s router and check for firmware & software updates!)
And speaking of blackmail (extortion), a couple of weeks ago someone posted on Facebook that he was being blackmailed by scammers. In this case, the man claimed that the scammers were creating AI-generated images and threatening to embarrass the man unless he paid a ransom. Fortunately, the man chose the right path, informed law enforcement, notified friends and family! How would you respond to such a threat?
Once again, Meta has implemented a feature in Instagram that significantly impacts your privacy and automatically turned it on for all Instagram users. We strongly recommend turning this feature off! This setting puts you at risk because it allows Meta’s AI to use your photos and information by anyone on Instagram to create new content. (Source: Malwarebytes Blog)
One of our readers received this very interesting voicemail from Jennifer from AT&T. She was calling to say that the person was about to lose a 50% discount on his monthly bill! Wow, who knew that AT&T offered 50% discounts?! The recipient of this call was asked to call Jennifer back at 350-200-9462. This fraudulent call has been reported by others including on this Reddit post and on Robokiller, about a month ago. Enjoy the message, but lament the fact that it is highly unlikely that AT&T is offering half off!
Voicemail-AT&T Discount ending soon
A New York woman received a popup on her computer saying that she had a virus. Sadly, this resulted in scammers manipulating her to withdraw $140K to purchase gold bars to send to the scammers! Thankfully, her bank flagged the transaction, contacted police and this story ended well! Check out… https://patch.com/new-york/hauppauge/scammers-listened-through-computer-suffolk-detectives-stopped-140k-gold-scheme
Also on the positive side, a cashier stopped another woman from giving $22,000 over to scammers!
https://www.kwch.com/2026/06/30/cashier-saves-salina-woman-losing-over-22000-bitcoin-scam/
By contrast, and terribly sadly, a Connecticut woman lost $900K in retirement savings to a romance scammer! Check out….
Finance Expert Dave Ramsey’s daughter fell for a scam that started as a text from USPS…
https://people.com/dave-ramsey-s-daughter-rachel-cruze-admits-she-fell-for-text-scam-12008501
According to this MSN article, retailers are increasingly using AI tools to prevent return fraud by consumers!
AI tools Claude and Chatgpt are incorporating with Norton to detect scams. Check out…
https://gizmodo.com/claude-and-chatgpt-just-got-a-scam-detector-and-norton-is-behind-it-2000779995
If you were offered a free house cleaning service, but told that in return you would allow the cleaning staff to wear a camera to film their effort in order to teach AI robots more about people’s homes and how to clean them, would you do it? The companies doing this claim to also completely clean any personal information revealed in this process and anonymize your data before sharing it with robots and others. Since we’ve seen how wonderfully (said sarcastically!) this has worked by other companies in the past, including data breaches, lies and outright misuse of data, we respectfully decline! More details about this offer are here…
https://www.fastcompany.com/91564760/shift-free-house-cleaning-data-privacy
There’s a luggage scam targeting your checked bag! Wow, scammers are so creative!
https://www.travelandleisure.com/airline-luggage-tag-scam-warning-11975317
Here’s how some World Cup crypto prediction sites steal your money….
For Victims of Fraud:
Scam Alert is an international victim reporting and intelligence platform. It gently guides scam victims through a detailed process to record essential evidence such as crypto wallet addresses, transaction hashes, and scam websites. Reports are enhanced with blockchain analytics to uncover typologies, link cases, and map criminal networks. Victims receive a report for submission to their local authorities, while Scam Alert works directly with LEAs, WASPs, and exchanges to ensure intelligence is delivered in a digestible format. With victim consent, Scam Alert even provides follow-up updates if there is further related activity and information that could benefit the victim, such as asset seizure by authorities. This service is free-to-use for scam victims, so feel free to share this with your newsletter subscribers! https://scam-alert.io/
Early last week we heard from a couple about a scam email that the wife fell for. It was one of those Punchbowl Invitations (see below) that appeared to be sent from someone she knew. But it was a fraud and she didn’t realize the email did not come from punchbowl.com. It’s likely that this threat was created after the cybercriminals managed to scrape the supposed sender’s contact list. The wife clicked the link to look at the invitation but was asked to sign in using her Gmail account. She did so and was immediately notified that her password didn’t work. She tried once more, and again it was denied. That’s when she looked more closely and suddenly realized that she wasn’t on punchbowl.com! She was on a website called onlineserviceswebs[.]com. This domain was registered one month earlier, on June 11, in Lithuania. She immediately went into her Gmail account and quickly changed her password, and also added 2-factor authentication to her account. Then she notified her husband who reached out to us to ask if we had any other advice for them. We did! We urged her to….
- Go back into her Gmail settings to make sure the scammers hadn’t already been in and quickly added a “back door” by having her emails forwarded to another email address. (They hadn’t.)
- Visit every account they had that used the same password as her Gmail password and change it immediately! They should start by prioritizing financial accounts like bank accounts, etc.
One of our readers sent us this very upsetting email. Apparently, the current US Government Administration has so eroded the trust across our country that 49 of our 50 states have pulled out of our 250 year experiment of Democracy. That is, at least, the only way we can interpret the source of this email. It supposedly came from the United State Department of Justice. Just one! (That reference of “just one” reminded us of an hysterical comedy routine by the Comedian Anjelah Johnson-Reyes.) The email contains a secure link to court papers. Perhaps these papers are about your State pulling out of our no-longer-so-perfect Union? We can’t be sure but we do know that the link in this phishing fraud points to an unsafe website called ristestate[,]com and not Docusign! And, making this so much worse is that Sucur.net has found malware lying in wait at ristestate[,]com! Remember to report your smelly phish to us and Google! https://safebrowsing.google.com/safebrowsing/report_phish/
Help Recover My Inheritance
Check out what an unusual request a businessman received from Lan Ben through her Gmail account. “Lån” is most commonly a name of Vietnamese or Chinese origin, based on our search results. For example, in Vietnamese we think it means “orchid.” But Lan Ben suddenly became Cute Linda Benson,asking for help to recover her inheritance and move to the US. It must have been hard reaching out to a stranger to ask for help. But there were no email addresses in the TO field. So it means that the recipient’s email was placed into the hidden BCC field. Hmmmm…..we’ll be he wasn’t the only one contacted by Cute Linda Benson!
Dear Sponsor, Download This File
We recently heard from the Home Office Compliant Unit. Please don’t ask us what business this Unit represented because they didn’t say. However, according to the email below, we at The Daily Scam are a Sponsor! But of what? I checked with David and Rob and none of us sponsored anything in the name of TheDailyScam.com. So what exactly is this email about?! It was sent from a domain called werwebs[.]com. According to the WHOIS tool at DomainTools, it was registered nearly 3 years ago and that website is being hosted on a server using the IP address: 37.59.114.134. IPLocation.net informs us that this IP address is located in the city of Robaix, France. And the only thing we find sitting on the top page of the Werwebs[.]com website is a login screen to an email service that includes a graphic of a cow waving at us. (See below.) So now we’re supposed to believe that we sponsored something in France?! That makes even less sense to us! It turns out that the domain Werwebs[.]com is rated 42/100 by Scamadviser.com, meaning visitors are asked to be cautious about this site. But Scam-Detector.com rates it as 10/100, meaning untrustworthy, risky and dangerous! We’re going to proudly rate it 1/100 meaning extremely dangerous given the fact that we never sponsored anything and the email shown below included a link to auto-download a file hosted on a Google account. No thanks.
One of our readers received this exciting recruitment text from “Hildegard Cola Prete” (or is it “Hildegard Colaprete?”) who claimed to represent Amazon Recruitment. Although we did find that odd for Hildegard to send out this text offer from her free Outlook account. However, the idea of making $1000 per day sounds very enticing, doesn’t it? Perhaps we’ll text her at 646-204-3534 to inquire!
Until next week, surf safely!
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