Easy one also because … pretty dubious phone number. Australia Post wouldn’t normally be calling from The Philippines.
I ignore all calls / texts from overseas. I understand that that won’t work for everyone. (I know a heap of people overseas but they don’t call / text me so if they ever did want to, they would have to arrange via another more credible mechanism first.)
Only if one knows about phone numbers. My Mum-in-law was barely able to read when wearing glasses. First hurdle. The second for those who can see to read the numbers - there is a cohort for whom international call codes may be meaningless. If we all had the deductive powers of AC Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple would either have risen to fame for through their mystery crime stories?
Now that it’s tax season again, be on the lookout for scam emails purporting to be from ATO or MyGov. This article explains how to spot and avoid being taken in by them.
Tax time is prime season for scammers.
It’s a period where we’re rushing to get our affairs in order, waiting to hear from the government about debts we’ll have to pay, or refunds we’ll receive.
Scammers know this and are poised to capitalise on the eagerness and financial anxiety many of us feel around the end of the financial year.
I’ve never been on LinkedIn - but somehow they have opened an account for me - been retired for years.
Every time I think I’ve got rid of it, it bobs up again.
An unusual situation. It may be of benefit to others is you can explain what has been happening in a little more detail.
If you would like to discuss what is happening further in private - IE not visible to the open Community (public), please advise in a reply to this post or contact me through a PM. There is some chance the source of the issue is a mistaken identity or part of a scam.
My Gmail (which I don’t use for real mail, but check regularly) has started advising “xyz has subscribed to you in LinkedIn” - I’ve had 3 or 4 of them now. I haven’t opened the e-mails or tried to go to LinkedIn, I marked them SPAM and deleted them.
This will most likely be scammers sending phishing emails. We regularly get ‘Linkedin’ emails on our business email address stating there is a problem (unauthorised access, accept someone trying to link up etc) and we need to resolve by logging in. The emails provide a ‘link’ to use.
These are phishing emails. We don’t have a LinkedIn account or profile.
As LinkedIn is a global platform, it is targeted by scammers. As a result ACMA has provided warnings:
Your action of not opening, marking as spam and deleting is the correct course of action.
It is worth noting that it is important not to open the emails. Scammers can now track active email addresses when content such as pictures are loaded into an opened email. Knowing an email address is active means more scam emails, phishing emails and spam.
Doesn’t everyone have “load pictures” turned off in their email browser so these tracking elements aren’t loaded?
I can confidently say that, no, not everyone has “load pictures” turned off. (If it’s not “off” by default then a great many users will have the setting “on” through ignorance, not choice.)
However I certainly do have it turned off by default - and then enable it for specific trusted senders / sources / individual emails as required. As is often the case, protecting your privacy and security comes with a small cost in convenience.
As an added complication, some people use host native software to access email, some people use a web interface and some people will be using an app etc. So it is difficult to generalise about “everyone”.
The whole idea of remote images in an email is a bit bogus. It made sense when internet bandwidths were heaps lower than they are today. These days you can either attach images or embed images and most senders and most receivers will hardly notice the difference. (In particular, if the receiver has default “on” then remote images will likely be slower for the receiver, not the faster that was intended with this design approach.)
It even used to be possible to disable loading of images in a web page but I would guess that few if any people are configured that way these days.
If a company has a really unmaintained mailing list (lots of out-of-date or non-working email addresses on it), it might still make sense to use remote images - both to save bandwidth and to attempt to identify those email addresses that do / don’t need maintenance i.e. for tracking purposes.
And many email clients have images loading automatically as the default. Those that don’t, some can be accidentally set such that all images are accidentally loaded.
It is worth doing an internet search on the email clients one uses, on how to block the automatic loading of remote content.
I received an email supposedly from Telstra today telling me that my internet service would be suspended if I did not call them on 1800830012 by 18 September. This allegedly relates to their new “upfront plans.”
I am not used to seeing such an impending doom sort of correspondence from Telstra so I wonder if it is legitimate and whether that phone number is a legitimate Telstra call centre number. I would normally expect that sort of impending doom correspondence to come from scammers.
Any knowledge of such, please?
I agree that it doesn’t sound like Telstra’s usual style of correspondence. It sounds very scam-like – so if it is real, shame on Telstra!
I suggest you sign in to your Telstra account online and check whether there’s anything amiss / pending with your service/s. Anything important should be noted there. If you’re not sure, use one of the Contact Us methods online to get in touch with Telstra, not the 1800 number in the email.
It is possible the message is legitimate. I suggest you contact Telstra using known contact methods from their website:
and advise you have received an email that your “internet service would be suspended if I did not call them”. They will be able to confirm if it is legitimate, and if it is, the context of the email message if it is. They will also confirm it is a scam message, if it proves to he a scam.
This used to be a Telstra number, number for contacting Telstra on their internet plans:
So it may be possible the number is legitimate if still held by Telstra. Notwithstanding this, use contact details on their website rather than ringing the 1800 phone number in the email.
It turns out that the email and 1800 number are legitimate.
I walked past a Telstra shop today and took the opportunity to walk in to show them the email and ask if it was legitimate. They looked up the details of my Telstra services on their screen in front of me and, yes, there was a note there saying that I needed to contact them to arrange the transfer of my services to their new system. They could not do it there in the shop but told me that I needed to call the 1800 number to make that happen.
That shop visit was unexpectedly bountiful as the very nice young lady who was attending to my enquiry also pointed out that I had loyalty points that were expiring soon and that she could fix me up with something from their goods in the store. Who takes notice of loyalty points accumulating with Telstra simply for paying the monthly bill. I certainly don’t. Anyway, I walked out with a wireless mobile phone battery charger paid for with the soon-to-expire loyalty points.
I have since called the 1800 number and authorised the things that they wanted authorised.
Two observations, though. The first is that the bloke who I spoke to on the phone had a very, very, very heavy Indian accent which was very difficult to understand. I do hope that this very polite gentleman was working in a call centre located in Australia but I suspect that he was not.
The second thing to note is a sad commentary of our times and that is that the Telstra shop that I visited, dead smack in the centre of Brisbane’s main street, with plenty of police standing out in street 10 metres nearby, had a security guard in high vis clothing standing near the front entrance. How sad it is that something as ordinary as a Telstra store needs to have a security guard at its front entrance.
Probably for protection of the staff from irate customers.
As always the advice in response to such an email is: use a reliable means to get a contact number for Telstra (e.g. a recent bill), not the number that the email gives you, and ring Telstra to confirm that the email is legitimate or in any case to deal with the matter at hand if the email is legitimate.
I’m surprised that Telstra needs you to do anything. They just moved me to their new “upfront plans” (more expensive, of course, but they are giving a discount for X months to get the price back to what it was) / their new system / whatever exactly it is that Telstra is doing.
I received the first email about this in April (telling me that it was going to happen) and an email in July (telling me that it had happened). I am not aware that I had to do anything at all at any time in respect of this change.
Might the presence of plenty of police in the street nearby mean there was a high alert because of a security threat? The security guard might have been watching the nearest entrance to the mall, rather than the Telstra shop.
There have been some very nasty incidents in shopping malls in recent times.
It is increasingly common for many shops to have security contractors at their doors. To wit the local JB’s have them as do shops having higher ticket products where a perp can grab and run.
I had a question to resolve and opted to visit the Telstra shop exactly to avoid the long waiting times on the phone, the clear/unclear language problems, and the many questions to establish my identity going back to my ancestry.
At the shop they could look me up on their computer but asked me to call Telstra for an answer to my question.
Just wonder what the assistants in the Telstra shop are there for?
Selling people stuff 
Same at their competitors’ shops.
Banks are heading the same way whereby the local staff sometimes need to ring their call centre to get something done that they are not empowered to do themselves. OTOH those same staff are entrusted to sell, sell, sell, and do you want insurance or a new mortgage with that cash withdrawal? No? The ATM is over there, need help using it?
Not even that, they just supervise while we scan our cards/phone to pay for whatever item we have selected all by ourselves. Don’t ask them anything..they just don’t know..what did you take them for, expert salespeople?
