WARNING ETO EMAIL LINK

[large_ghostman]

Just to warn you about a email that claims to be from ETO facebook page, DO NOT CLICK ON IT OR OPEN!!

I dont have facebook but now and then I get emails from ETO I have to be honest and say most I just bin, but one said about a Iphone 6 offer for £1 from ETO facebook, it was a kind of competition and I clicked the link .

Now I am not blaming ETO but who is the best person here to contact to give full details? I dont want to put all the details here as its pretty serious, but looking back I doubt the owners know this is going on, and having seen what happens and the amount your stung for I cant see the company behind ETO sanctioning a 3rd party like this.

So which of the admin deal with frauds committed in there company name? Like I say I am not holding them responsible in anyway, but if it is a 3rd party they deal with then they need to know what this company is upto, if they dont deal with them then I guess they still need to know there name is being used in a scam.

I am hoping I can get a phone number for the scammers now that call I will tape for ya!

 

[DerStrom8]

Hi LG, thanks very much for the heads-up!

I would start with dmiyares . He should be able to tell you who to contact, though I'm not sure this is even something in ETO's power.

Regards,
Matt

 

[large_ghostman]

Hi LG, thanks very much for the heads-up!

I would start with dmiyares . He should be able to tell you who to contact, though I'm not sure this is even something in ETO's power.

Regards,
Matt

Hi Matt
Two reasons I think they need to know.

1) If this is really a third party they are marketing with then they need to know what the third party is doing in there name. The amount wasnt small and it was highly convincing, the ETO logo and facebook link was spot on. So if they are sharing details with this company they need to stop or at least consider if its wise to be involved with a company that when you look into it are all over the web as scammers.

2) If they know nothing about this company then maybe they will want to know about them using the ETO name and the company name in a scam, I doubt they can do much if this is the case but it could cause them some serious damage to there reputation. I am not after the money I no there is zero chance of that, I am not sure how they got my email address in the first place let alone some of the other details. This is why I assumed it was from here, I am not a normal web surfer i dont have facebook and stuff like twitter, i am a member of 5 forums and use only 3 with regularity. I NEVER give my real email unless i am totally sure I know the person. I fill online forms out with a self disposing email address.

Like I say its more a heads up for them, I doubt they will want there facebook page or the forum harvested. I cant think of anywhere else that email address could have been harvested from

 

[large_ghostman]

I have changed my email on here, lets see if this account email is targeted then i will at least know if its a third party company they know about or not, what was really odd is the email I use for here is ONLY used for this forum. I dont use hotmail or any service like that, I use our own domain email addresses, the one I used for here was a PITA to type as the G key was iffy on the keyboard, so It kind of got orphaned to use only on ETO, I have now switched it here to the email I normally use.

Thats the only reason I think it might be a third party company they deal with, as NO ONE but ETO has that email address. I wouldnt have clicked on the email had it not had ETO on it

 

[DerStrom8]

Good thinking LG.

May I ask exactly what you did? You mentioned clicking the link, but what did the page look like when you got there? How did they charge you? How much did they charge? Was there fine print?

Just looking for more details if they're available. It might help to track down the culprit(s).

 

[large_ghostman]

Good thinking LG.

May I ask exactly what you did? You mentioned clicking the link, but what did the page look like when you got there? How did they charge you? How much did they charge? Was there fine print?

Just looking for more details if they're available. It might help to track down the culprit(s).

I will give some info but dont want to say too much until I have spoken with ETO.

I got an email, lucky enough on the laptop (now formatted and reinstalled) the laptop is the only machine with thunderbird email client configured to download emails on the email address I used for ETO.
The email said it was from ETO and had two links on, one took me to the ETO facebook page and the other took me to a page that said apple was clearing stocks of the old iphone ready for the launch of the new one. As I was a member of ETO I was eligible to apply for 1 of 500 phones and all I had to pay was £1 for P&P.

Now I got to skip a few details for now but will fill them in later.

The reason it got me is the email said it was in partnership with the company behind ETO and this was a marketing exercise for members with 5 years plus membership. The details given on the email went something like
Can you confirm you are...................... It gave a name
Your membership started on...................It gave my start date

There was alot of information already in the email and it looked like a marketing email using the ETO logo. Whats really got me is the email address used, when we first was going to move to Scotland my mum and dad were going to buy a Deli and Butchers shop, so they registered the domain name of it, This was my first real email address and I switch my ETO over to it, the Butchers deal fell through as the bloke decided not to sell in the end, but we ended keeping the domain name (kind of).

We got another domain that goes with the estate where we live so I use that for everything else important and all form I use a micky mouse account.

So while I am not suggesting for a minuet ETO would be behind something like this, they are a marketing company and I assume work with promotions from companies, if this is one company they work with I doubt they will want to continue and if it isnt then there name might get dragged down the mud hole which is unfair. I am really careful online as you know, and had it not had ETO and alot of my other details in the email correct then i would have ignored it. It looks more like some kind of email harvesting as the company address is given as Gibraltar but its a false address.

Mum has contacted the police so will be careful what I say in the open until i know whats going on. Bloody bank dosnt have an overdraft on that account!! its the one I use in my mums name, first time they have every let it go overdrawn!! How cheeky is that!

 

[large_ghostman]

Pmed you Matt, hopefully it will make sense.

For everyone else just be careful as the emails look like ETO ones. I am trying to get the email header so i can check IP etc

 

[prof328]

Sorry you fell for the scam, I keep all the scam emails I receive (not sure why), maybe to try to trace the source one day, I have 105 of them in my junk folder.

They pretend to be all sorts of institutions, banks etc. and I don't know where they get my email address from either, I don't have facebook, twitter or anything like that, I don't even have a mobile phone, and I am very careful online, I dont even allow cookies and use ghostery to block them ALL.

The criminals tend to use temporary email addresses and operate in a hit and run fashion to make it hard to catch them.

If you hover your mouse over the link they want you to click and examine it usually it gives the game away as it clearly is nothing to do with the organisation they are purporting to be.

 

[large_ghostman]

Sorry you fell for the scam, I keep all the scam emails I receive (not sure why), maybe to try to trace the source one day, I have 105 of them in my junk folder.

They pretend to be all sorts of institutions, banks etc. and I don't know where they get my email address from either, I don't have facebook, twitter or anything like that, I don't even have a mobile phone, and I am very careful online, I dont even allow cookies and use ghostery to block them ALL.

The criminals tend to use temporary email addresses and operate in a hit and run fashion to make it hard to catch them.

If you hover your mouse over the link they want you to click and examine it usually it gives the game away as it clearly is nothing to do with the organisation they are purporting to be.

I am also careful, I have rung up scammers before (I did a post here ), But they caught me because the email claimed to be connected to ETO and was sent to an email address I have only ever used with ETO, that made me drop my guard a bit, then it gave details like length of membership here, so all in all it did look like some kind of marketing campaign in conjunction with the marketing company that own ETO.

Nothing bad happens for 4 days, then suddenly your charged a large amount, when you look into the membership fee its only visible on page 204 of a 500 page agreement form. No where else is this mentioned, and to be honest £1 for what they were offering would normally make me very suspicious, but it said is was in conjunction with ETO and a marketing campaign and seemed to add up. I have left some detail out for now, and if any of you get a email like this you will see the kind of detail I left out.

I am reading more and more about the company behind it, the more I read the more I am certain ETO owners have nothing whatsoever to do with it, but I still have to wonder how they got that particular email address. maybe the site has been harvested for emails, I dont know and no point speculating until I know more, but ultimately at least now there is a heads up so hopefully no one else will get caught.

 

[KeepItSimpleStupid]

I got the infamous "Windows Technical Support Department" call yesterday.
The Indian spammers that show you the error log; then ask you to install TeamViewer or similar; determine how many comutes you have; they change your password to encrypt your hard disk and then offer you a package for x dollars to fix it. (Ransomware). Sometimes I get bored and play with them. There's a good video on Youtube that outlines the entire cam.

 

[large_ghostman]

This was way more clever than that.

I will give details when I can but at the moment the site Admin etc are looking into things etc.
But I will give you an analogy thats pretty close to how you get caught.

those of us that have been here a few years remember when you could help the forum with a monthly donation of around $7 I think?? Or maybe it was $7 a year, I cant remember the exact amount but it was low and you got a grey badge under name saying forum supporter. All good stuff

There was talk about having a section of the forum just for 'forrum supporters' but that never happened, lets just suppose in this scenario the extra section was added.

No the scam WOULD go,,,,, Pay $7 a year and get a grey badge under your name for 12 months and free 4 day trial access to the supporters only forum, subject to terms and conditions tick this box to agree.

Now the T&C's in the box are pretty short and dont say much, except near the end it says you are agreeing to the full terms and conditions. This is what got me in way, I assumed I had read the full terms and conditions because I read the entire box and ticked it. Now a week or so after doing this you find 2 two payments for alot more than $7 has gone out of the account!! So you investigate.
Turns out the trial free trial membership to the supporters only area is say $100 every 4 days and the membership is auto renewable!! Dosnt say that in the box you tick and dosnt have to, because it says full T&C's you have to make sure the box is full T&C's. When I searched the company online I found alot of people from Amazon .com had also been caught by the same people, there was a link to the companies full T&C's hidden on there web site, it is 500 pages and on page 240 odd it says something like.... ....Member ship to the supporters area is $100 every 4 days and you agree to auto renewal

The above is purely an analogy so older member understand why the scam worked, the email had ETO links that resolved to the ETO site and ETO facebook page, it claimed to be an offer in conjunction with ETO and it was £1 for a special offer promotion and 4 days membership free to an offer site. I was careful I read the box and ticked it, They have apparently done nothing illegal because I ticked a box saying I agreed to the full terms and conditions but it neglected to tell me that the box wasnt it nor did it provide a link to them, if it had of done I would see 500 pages and would have sussed something was wrong, T&C's 500 pages long always have something to hide on a free offer site!

Looks like ETO had nothing to do with it, and looks like the forum software is secure, also no one else seems to have had this email. So at the moment I am totally bewildered how they got the email, the other info I can understand but not the email address......

$ days is a clever lengh of time as banking in UK is 5 days, so which ever way you cook it they will get 2 payments from you before it will flag, and that is if you check your bank daily. I ordered some stuff off ebay to help finish a 'work' project, paypal bounced the payment. I didnt understand this as I normally know within £1 how much is in that account as only I use it and rarely is there much in it. But the bank in its stupidity allowed an overdraft on an account with no overdraft and only when it had paid the second amount did the bank start screaming at us for being overdrawn. I didnt get why it was overdrawn so looked into it.

That is about as much as I want to say for now, I am working with the Admin and the police are in touch, we wont get the money back but when I am able I will give you all the details and show you a pic of the email.

To stress again I do not believe ETO was responsible or knew of the offer, nor do I think they were working with the company, Although be careful because the scam in a slightly different form is alive on AMAZON! and Amazon are working with the company doing a promotion!!
Amazon run there own scam called Amazon prime, you get a free trial and hidden in the info is a auto renewal that can catch you out.

 

[prof328]

I think I came upon a similar scam to the one you had yesterday, not linked to ETO but purported to be a survey from my isp, it asked five silly questions that only required ranking and then the site offered a selection of free gifts, one was face cream worth £149 and another was a chance to win an iphone6 for £1.
This is the site PLEASE DO NOT FOLLOW THE END SCREEN TO CLAIM A GIFT.
surveysforbrands.com/7/UnitedKingdom.php?&c1=SADUK1&c2=&t202kw=16187166

The site is hosted by surveysforbrands.com and is based in California.
surveysforbrands.com.ipaddress.com/

Clearly nothing what so ever to do with my isp here in the uk, and would my isp be so generous as to offer free gifts of such value for answering five silly questions - most certainly not so I am fairly sure this is a scam. They are offering gifts for a nominal amount of money, just the postage etc, simply to get your banking details.

But who do you report this kind of criminal behavior to, normally it would be the site hosting company in the first instance, if they are reputable they should remove the site, but their contact information even looks suspicious.

<Mod Edit: Removed the hyperlinks - Much safer that way. In order for someone to go to the site, they have to copy and paste the text into their browser and add the http:// prefix. Better than accidentally clicking>

 

[large_ghostman]

I will update later when I can, Looks like we have narrowed it down. Amazon seem to actually be working with this company and there is a sugestion that apple is also doing promo's with them, but I am not sure as half the web says apple uses them and half says it dosnt. But Amazon for sure have a connection with them,

ETO DOES NOT HAVE ANY CONNECTION WITH THEM.

The admin has been great in trying to pin point what happened, it looks like its probally an email client or the email server my end, with a limited use email account its only target would have been Amazon or ETO emails, Amazon also sent me an offer recently but until this morning I didnt know the same email account had been used for both. When I have all the details then I will explain exactly whats happened, its hard to see how you can protect yourself from it. On another note MAC users that use a bit torrents be aware there has recently been MAC malware in the wild connected with a bit torrent client, I cant remember the name of the client but its the same one I use with Linux. I use thunderbird Email client and it recently updated, I am checking if this has been hit but so far cant find any info on it.

 

[large_ghostman]

Going to update later and give you 99% of what has actually happened, I am not too sure how you would avoid something like this without hindsight so i am going to give you that hindsight.

 

[large_ghostman]

Ok this is a rough breakdown for now of what I KNOW.

We zoom back in time to a laptop that suffers from a keyboard that has certain keys on that dont work (happens to all my laptops! why?) even if I use a USB keyboard the same keys just dont work. I so stopped using the laptop and eventually got another cheap replacement.
On that laptop was a program called thunderbird (email client), it was configured to download emails from a email account I set up a long time ago, I never bothered adding it to the newer laptop or pc, I used the email address for this site and as it turns out I had also used it for making an account in my dads name for Amazon.

I rarely use Amazon I normally use ebay and for books I prefer Abe books, however as I posted a while back I got a great deal on what was essentially an all but new AOE 3rd ed really cheap off Amazon. I signed into Amazon on the PC and didnt bother checking the laptop emails, to be fair I had totally forgotten I had used the email address to set up Amazon ages ago.

I have no idea how this all connects yet so i will just give you the time lines and what I did.

The laptop run unbuntu and as far as I know there is no known malware for it at the mo.

I know There is a mac virus connected to TRANSMISSION torrent client, it was on the official Transmission download site. I have a sneaky that That there is also one for one of the lnux thunderbird updates but cant find any confirmation of this.

I got the book and a few weeks later we got an Amazon prime card in the post in my dads name, I thought it odd but didnt really take much notice. It asked me to register the card but I saw no point and didnt bother. Now I am aware happy crooky are used for promos on Amazon and Amazon prime is a very similar scam to the one happy crooky run.

I needed to use the old laptop and while I was on it it updated the system and thunderbird, it also downloaded ALL the emails on the email server I dont bother with, this is where I dont know what or how its done, but my suspicion is the malware was on the email server or on the thunderbird update, it had only two avenues one was to clone a ETO email and one was to clone an AMAZON one, I have never asked for an Amazon Prim card (free trial) so thats a bit odd in itself, the ETO email offered me a deal claiming it was because i was a long standing member etc etc. It had real ETO links to the forum and Facebook, so I clicked on the link and fill out the details (why not i trust eto?), it asked for proof of age and a nominal fee of £1, this seemed reasonable and I came up against this alot online, its one reason my mum has an account in her name that only I use. Some of things you have to be 18 to buy are stupid, I also run a company in my mums name and need to buy chemicals so all this is done with the same card, my mum then takes money (if there is any) from the real company account and put its in the bank account I use. For protection and safety the bank account is a very simple one, no cheque book, no overdraft no benefits just a debit card.

The idea is money can go in the account and be moved to the real company bank account almost tstraight away without giving out the details of the company account, as this account does have a small OD facility (£300). It also means if I need to buy something online I can put money in from the company account to cover the purchase and be safe in the knowledge that if something goes wrong the account dosnt have a overdraft and the bank will simply refuse the payment.

This is where the bank failed! For the first time in 3 years it actually honored 3 payments with no funds in the account! they say its because of the way the payment was presented and the company being offshore (happy crooky). I think they just fcked up, and now they are telling us they cant use the distance rules to get the money back??? But they are waving the fees for being overdrawn without an overdraft.
This will be a battle with the bank, but seeing as its owned by the TAX payer (RBS) then I wont give in until they give me back the money! Actually apart from £72 there was no money in it, so the stand off is I am not paying the overdraft. the £72 was for a purchase i was making, as it turns out happy crooky got it instead and although the bank could see 2 other payments to them due to go through they said they couldnt stop them.

So how do you protect yourself?

Honestly there is only one way in the end, as much as we love ETO and other places and as much as they love us, there is one simple fact, there is no such thing as a free lunch, if the deal is better than good then your getting weed on and being told its raining . No one including ETO is going to give you a deal too good to be true. I wish I could be more helpful and tell you what to look for, but seriously unless you get one email a day and can sift through all the headers and delve deeply into them, then the one and only thing likely to protect against this kind of attack is the above advice.

Maybe if your not sure pm or ask in a thread if ETO or whoever are running a promo with X company, not too much else you can do. People say read the user agreement, I did or at least i thought the blurb In the box I ticked was the T&C's but they wernt, one simple line got me...........Subject to the FULL T&C's, its down to you to actually check what you have read and agreed too is the full T&C's, then even if you go looking for them dont expect them to be easy to find, again this should ring alarms bells, finally when you find them look at it this way.............

Why 500 pages for a £1 transaction? dosnt add up so walk away, I didnt look at it this way before so hopefully my hindsight might help you in the future. One last thing....

NEVER get smug and post about screwing over the scammers online and how you never get caught, humility in all things or murphy is gonna bite .

 

[prof328]

It is a lesson learnt the hard way, but you will be far more guarded in the future.

In my case the scam website was hosted by surveysforbrands.com but the isp was a company called cloudflare.
I thought I would report the website to cloudflare in an attempt to prevent anyone falling for the scam, but finding any contact details other than phone (USA) was not obvious, eventually I found a complaint form to report misuse, however, at the end of the form which required my name and email address was the following text -

"By submitting this report, you consent to the above information potentially being released by CloudFlare to third parties such as the website owner, the responsible hosting provider, law enforcement, and/or entities like Chilling Effects."

Now given that the website is being used by a criminal, the last thing I want is for my details to be passed on to the website owner, this effectively prevents me from reporting the scam.

 

[KeepItSimpleStupid]

There is a Thunderbird exploit too.