My wife and various friends almost (or maybe have been) caught

A good friend, let's say Mary, (recently widowed) emailed my wife saying she couldn't phone as she had laryngitis and saying "can I ask you something". being of a suspicious nature that would have rung alarm bells with me but for various good reasons my wife was more than willing to help Mary and replied saying "of course".
Three minutes later another email arrived with usual sad story. Terminally ill friend, made promise, can't keep it, could you (my wife) get her an Apply Gift Card and she (Mary) will reimburse. Fortunately at this point my wife forwarded it to my computer - obvious phising email.

I assume the scammer was somehow monitoring Mary's emails hence the second email with the request. I assume next stage, had my wife said they would do so, would be a false link to where she could get the Card .

OK - we're ignoring all this, though my wife will phone Mary to tell her. The problem is that I know, from other people who have contacted me, that many of Mary's friends in the village will have got this message. Many of them are vulnerable ones as Mary is in her 80s . All I can think of doing is sending a warning to them and saying ignore. My concern is that I suspect , given the person concerned and her circle of friends, that many may fall for it.

If it were me, I'd most likely call or visit each person and explain to them what is happening.

Ian,

Well done.
Forward the email to the National Cyber Security Centre at: report@phishing.gov.uk

Perhaps her email account has been hacked into and that's how her email is being monitored.

Denis

I keep telling my friends and family to stop cc'ing me on their round robins! I get replies from people I don't know and, if their email is hacked, the hackers have my email too. Why can't people use bcc correctly????

Send a text message to all the contacts you are worried about and get them to send a text message to the people they are worried about.

Text is faster and can be much more trusted, Ian.

Also, Ian, ask them not to forward the message but to copy or reword it. Or eventually as kelper said a possible round robin could eventuate. And tell your wife good on her for not clicking on anything, wising up and bringing you in.

Maybe you should set up automatic forwarding (copies of emails) to your account.

Check if your email address is in a data breach (I don't know how well it works.)

abactuon said:

Maybe you should set up automatic forwarding (copies of emails) to your account.

Check if your email address is in a data breach (I don't know how well it works.)

Have I Been Pwned: Check if your email has been compromised in a data breach

Have I Been Pwned allows you to search across multiple data breaches to see if your email address or phone number has been compromised.

haveibeenpwned.com

Click to expand...

The good lady did well on her own.

That website is OK. It’s helpful if you may have failed to read or never received notification of a breach.
But it’s only as good as the data that is made available. Not all site breaches need to be reported. There are certain requirements and criteria per country on when, if and how.

UK


USA (Currently unavailable)


Australia


And then each country has certain criteria surrounding what kind of data breach, how many people were compromised etc, before they need to notify their Governments.

I have a pre made post about this somewhere, I am failing to find it in the forum.

Caller apps allow you to block some spam and scam calls, but it is disabled by default.
You can setup a secure DNS like Cloudflare (1.1.1.2/1.0.0.2), it blocks malicious links.

There are also extensions like

This is a scene from a recent movie Beekeeper, it shows, how it works:

There are no problems with e-mail in our country.
The problem is the leakage of phone numbers. Scammers can call at any time of the day or night.
The police don't do anything.
The only way to protect yourself is to use a phone number other than your main phone number when registering on websites.
(and only use an e-card (specifically designed for online payments only) when paying on websites)).

I had wondered about texting but if I am correct and my wife's email back to Mary was monitored in some way, wouldn't a warning also be?
I know - one can get quite paranoid about all this.

On the topic of cc and bcc mentioned by Kelper, again on my wife's PC, I get very niggled at some that use cc and get her to tell them off every time. She is the local branch chairman of AI so gets various emails re latest actions. Some come with cc used rather bcc. Rich harvest - not only a big list of valid emails but an indication of one of their areas of interest.

Sigurd said:

I had wondered about texting but if I am correct and my wife's email back to Mary was monitored in some way, wouldn't a warning also be

Click to expand...

Is your wife's mobile number in some way included in her emails, like in her signature or something? If not, you’ll be fine. Even if it was, no.
They would be some pretty sophisticated hackers if they were doing that, and if they were that good, their sights would be set higher.
Did you check the email address it was sent to your wife from? My guess, it isn’t Mary’s?

@Sigurd

Would it be too painful to get your good lady to move to a new email address? Gmail is free and has many features to protect against spam and scammers. I think it's unlikely that hackers are monitoring her outgoing emails. This would be prevented in future if she changed her password.
I assume you have scanned her computer with at least two online virus checkers?

Is she using Windows 11? Is it up to date?

Of course, no anti virus can protect us from plausible but deceitful emails.

We should all be cynical of requests for money, bank details etc. My wife and I have a few secret code words that we could use to discredit these interlopers. I suggest some good lies. My bank, like many, wants to know my mother's maiden name, the first school I attended, my first pet's name etc. As they have no way to verify any of these, all my answers are completely fictitious. My primary school is Yale and my first pet is called Donald J Trump VI.

Changing her address or mine would create a lot of problems. As you may have gathered we are both quite heavily involved in parish civic and church affairs and our email addresses reflect that and have been in use for more than 20 years.
We have not had any problems personally. We obey the safety rules!

I hadn't thought about lying when asked about mother's maiden name, school etc. Good one!

I thought my bank wanted my mother's maiden name as they were going to verify it, but they wanted a Q and A that I was unlikely to forget. But it was daft because others could have found that info quite easily.

As I said - good idea about lying but I would need to write down my lies as I don't trust my memory that much these days.