Have you noticed a downturn in the number of phishing emails you receive from PayPal? If not you should have, or at least receive more from other companies in comparison.
Abbey is now the No.1 phishing target, in the last quarter they attracted 32.99% of all phishing according to anti-spam company ClearMyMail. They were followed by Citibank with 19.15% and NatWest with 11.6%.
PayPal only attracted 7.19% of spam which although still high is considerably less than when the held the No.1 position as a target.
More frightening is the 8,156 phishing emails per person that were received in the first three months of the year. That’s 90 phishing emails per day per Internet user, that has to be filtered either manually or with spam filters. 😯
How do you handle your email spam?
9 Responses
I wonder if eBay/PayPal’s ongoing education programme on phishing over a number of years has paid off. Perhaps eBay/PayPal users are less attractive as targets because they fall for the scams less. Perhaps Abbey customers provide richer pickings these days?
How do you handle your email spam?
emails > spamcop > mailwasher > OutLook
Thats seems to kill most (for me) before they get to OutLook
Never understood why Phishers/Spammers don’t learn to spell, I am sure there success ratio would be much higher if they did.
I guess we are all lucky, email is part of our lives so we are completely comfortable with spam and know how to deal with it, my Gran sends probably 2 emails a year, if something popped up in her email account saying it was from her bank and it looked like her bank I have no doubt she would fall for it.
Sometimes spam filters can be to clever though and I can miss important correspondence.
Plesk hosting kills spams that get a certain rating
Then spamarrest.com checks the email
Then Outlook
Under this plan, I now get around 500 spams per day instead of 4000.
A problem I have is that my hotmail address which I’ve had since about a week after I discovered the internet is regularly used as a “from” address for spam. And as a result if I send anything from the account it often doesn’t arrive having been filtered. How do I stop others using my email address to spam people? They don’t actually have access to my account. I don’t want to get rid of the account as I actually like using hotmail and most people know it’s my email now.
I use MailWasher Pro too – worth every penny (and thanks to Steve who convinced me to use it 🙂 )
The spam filters I really do detest are those that hold the spam and request user intervention from the sender to confirm that they’re actually a human. I have enough problems with my own spam (or at least I don’t – I have MailWasher to cleanse my mail) without replying to other people’s spam programs. Most of them get caught in my spam filter anyway so never get seen let alone actioned ]:) )
I’m not sure what you can do re Hotmail, Yael – it’s probably not just your account, it’s more likely most of hotmail that get marked as spam 🙁 There is no way you can prevent other people spoofing your email address as the “from” address. 🙁
Our IT bloke updated Kaspersky AV on my work PC recently & it now seems to have a Mail Despatcher feature, which enables you to preview & delete emails before they end up in your inbox. However, it doesn’t seem to be as advanced as Mailwasher & makes you go through every single email – which can be somewhat laborious on a Monday morning!
Dan – that may/may not be true but personally, I doubt it would deter scammers from posing as eBay or PayPal. As phishing ultimately relies upon throwing mud at a wall & seeing what sticks, I’d imagine they’d chuck as much of it as is possible.
That’s true, I have gotten a lot less PayPal phishing spam recently than I did before. I’m getting a lot less eBay ones as well. I was thinking that maybe people had simply grown wise to the whole thing.