Caught out by Spam comment (for once)

Over an average week I get two or three Spam comments on this blog, and pretty universally they are obvious for what they are - sometimes random words with embedded links in them, text often with poor English, or more recently they've been along the lines of "this is a really interesting article, your Blog has really inspired me".

Fortunately I am impressed by the Google spam comment filter which almost never mis-categorises a genuine Blog comment as spam, but conversely seems to always correctly identify the rubbish and remove it from the Blog so that all dear readers don't have to wade through it and we're just left with genuine Blog comments.

Of course I always have the administrator option to change Google's idea of what comments are spam or not, so I try to keep in the habit of marking Spam comments myself which I hope continues to "train" Google as to what is good and what is not.

But today I have to admit that I was fooled by the comment I received on the Blog and thought it was genuine.

Here it is:

Hi, I think your site might be having browser compatibility issues.
When I look at your website in Ie, it looks fine
but when opening in Internet Explorer, it has some overlapping.
I just wanted to give you a quick heads up!

Other then that, great blog!
Feel free to visit my homepage ... mens wellington boots

(I've removed the link that was on the wellington boot text)

Well sad to say I did actually go and check the Blog looked OK in Internet Explorer (and it does) before I realised that this was yet another bit of Spam ... and Google had correctly categorised it before I'd had chance to do so.

Nice try Mr Spammer but even if I'm more easily fooled, Google is just one step ahead of you!

Woken up last night by a Nigerian scammer

I'm in India right now which is 5 and a half hours ahead of GMT. I think I'm surviving on less sleep than normal because I'm going to bed at 2am IST every morning (still 8:30pm UK time) and getting up at 7:30am IST (a horrible 2am GMT).

This morning though I was woken up at middle-of-the-night o'clock by a text message telling me that I'd received a Gite booking enquiry. I read the text, decided it could wait until morning, and turned over back to sleep again.

When I got in to the office I read the enquiry that had disturbed me in the night. Here it is in full, as it's a classic example of the scam artform:

The start date you are interested in: 2/4/2011
For how long: 4 Weeks

Your contact information
Name : jean frank
Street Address : 11 rd clement
Town/City : Canada
E-mail : jean.frk7@gmail.com

Type your message here to include any special Requirements or Comments:
Interesting in your property for the period below:
Checking date:1st of April 2011
Checking out :30th April 2011.
Let me know the cost for the period .
adult on party :2
And do you have internet?as we been using our Pc for our stay.
Looking forward to hear from you asap! Thanks.

Message requested by IP address: 41.155.16.193
Date/Time: 26/02/2011 23:04:35

Immediately suspicious by the long booking duration, the not great English, and the disposable email address with a number in it, I went to check the IP address at the bottom which this particular holiday rental site helpfully adds to the bottom of the email.
(reminder to self, investigate adding enquirer IP address details to the Gite booking enquiry form on my own website).

Anyway, Domaintools' whois site translated the IP address into details of where this network address is actually registered:

IP Location: Nigeria Lagos Dial Pool Subnet For Lagos Subscribers

And that's all I needed to know. Thanks Mr Scammer, your Email has been promptly consigned to the junk folder!

Trust in an internet world when renting holiday properties

I've written before about some of the various scam booking attempts that we receive for our French holiday rental Gite, and in the main I'd like to hope I've got reasonably adept at spotting the ones that don't look "quite right" and fingers crossed we've not had any problems in the 5 years we've been renting the Gite.

You can usually spot the dodgy looking booking enquiries, either by the use of an overseas contact telephone number (such as 00 225 which is the international code for the Ivory Coast), or poor English spelling and grammar in the booking enquiry.

If ever I'm not sure I tend to copy some of the key phrases out of the booking request into google and see if anyone else has reported the same booking enquiry. These scammers don't tend to be original and you'll find exactly the same booking request is used time and time again with only the contact name and disposable email address changing each time. Another sure sign for doubt is email addresses ending in numbers such as fred987@yahoo.co.uk or bill2004@gmail.com.

One website I have found particularly useful when researching dubious bookings such as a 'surprise' honeymoon present is laymyhat.com's forum which is a meeting place for other holiday home rental owners.

The other day I received another enquiry I wasn't sure about and when I google'd some of the text from the enquiry I turned up another useful resource for spotting scam bookings, rentalseal's blog where they report details of current rental scams and rental scams in the news.

But on reading further I found that RentalSeal are more than just a blog, they've a fairly unique Internet business proposition, and to be honest one that I hadn't considered as being an issue up to now.

Their raison d'etre is quite simple, "how do you know the holiday home rental you are just about to book genuinely exists?"

Basically they offer the customer who wants to rent a holiday home (or 'vacation rental' as the American's say) protection against scammers who have duplicated attractive photos of vacation homes from the web and copied content from other legitimate vacation rental property listings in order to create their own fraudulent listings.

And I suppose I see how this could be a problem. It costs practically nothing to create a website and it's easy to copy someone else's website so if you copy a property listing, get it well ranked on the search engines then potentially unsuspecting customers will book to stay in the fraudulent property, pay their money up front, then when they arrive they find that it's all been an elaborate hoax.

RentalSeal's solution to this problem is to offer a "trust seal of authenticity" on your property listing. As the property owner you provide RentalSeal with details of your property and proof that you genuinely do own it such as insurance documents, property deeds or previous guest references, etc. RentalSeal then reviews your application, verifies all information, and issues you with a trust seal that you can display on your property website.

It's an interesting concept and perhaps for the ultra-concerned customer I can see how this might be a good idea, but I'm not personally convinced that its really necessary, or more importantly, value for money.

Firstly there's the cost. This verification doesn't come free of course, RentalSeal ask for $100 to cover the initial registration and then $30 per year as an annual renewal fee.

Secondly there's the question of recognition of RentalSeal itself. If this trust seal idea really took off, customers readily recognised the trust logo and absolutely every property website needed to have a RentalSeal approval if they wanted to have a half-decent chance of getting bookings, then I can see that this would be something I'd have to subscribe to.

But I'm not sure its there yet. Unlike some of the other 'safer shopping' logos such as Thawte, ShopSafe, WeTrust and TrustGuard, and merchant schemes such as Verified by Visa for secure credit card handling; I suspect that pretty much no-one has ever heard of RentalSeal and thus the value of the "seal" is severely diminished.

And finally there's the question of market penetration. After a bit of investigative searching on RentalSeal's property directory I've concluded that they've currently got 63 verified properties on their books, of which only 4 are in Europe (in Italy and Greece). And with such a low number its not going to be an organically growing trust seal any time now.


Returning back to the question of whether fraudulent property listings is really a big issue that needs a trust logo like this, personally we've never had any queries from customers worried that we might be trying to take their money and not have a holiday home for them to rent in return. Of course it may be because we've not got the RentalSeal logo that such concerned customers never lodge a booking enquiry in the first place, but with 80+ bookings over the last 5 years I somehow doubt it. If a potential customer was worried then I've got enough photos of the property, I'm more than happy to talk to customers on the phone, and of course there are all the previous happy customers that could act as referees if it really came to that.

I'll finish with one final thought though. How do I know that RentalSeal itself is to be trusted and isn't a form of even more elaborate internet scam? How do you trust the trustee in a potentially unsafe internet world?

All in all too complicated a problem I think.

Oddest 'contact us' holiday rental enquiry yet?

We get some pretty varied emails via the holiday home booking enquiry form. As well as the booking enquiries that of course we are hoping to get sent to us we also get a mixed bag of spam and scam attempts (some of which I have written about before - see previous postings about Scam rental enquiries).

Of course we also get a fair number of let's just say "adult" emails which are stuffed full of links to dubious websites that I have no intention of visiting. Fortunately Thunderbird's Junk email filter has now got pretty good at spotting and automatically filtering those out so I only have to go through the Junk mail folder every week or so and double check that nothing has slipped by.

But this email has got me stumped as to what to do with it, here's the full enquiry as I received it:

Hi - I was just wondering if you would be interested in buying my property in Brittany with a view to letting it out? Look forward to hearing from you. Regards Natalie Jones

And that's it. There's a return email address (with a number 2 in it and hosted at hotmail.co.uk - so that gets me suspicious), but there's no details of the property, where it is, how much Natalie might want for it, etc.

I think I won't persue it any further; I've enough 'fun' with looking after one Holiday Home and renovating the second, and even if it is genuine methinks I couldn't cope with another property - and I'm sure the bank wouldn't want to extend my line of credit even further.

Any thoughts?

Not going to return this missed call

Picked up my mobile phone this afternoon to notice that I'd had a missed call.

I've a meeting first thing tomorrow morning with a new customer so was partially expecting that I may get a work call today about tomorrow's meeting so wasn't all that surprised by receiving a call on a Sunday afternoon.

The caller's phone number hadn't been recognised and I didn't immediately recognise the number either .... +2348064296xxx ...

Did a google search of country code 234 as it wasn't one that I recognised immediately.

Ah-ha, country code +234 is Nigeria. I don't know anyone in Nigeria but I think it's highly likely that it's someone trying to scam me about something - probably the Gite.

I'm usually pretty good at spotting scam email booking requests like this one in February this year and this attempt last year to book a 'honeymoon'. But I've not had a telephone scam attempt before and I've no intention of having my first. No idea how the person got my mobile phone number as I don't publish it on the website.

Nearly got caught out by a spam booking

I'm usually pretty good at spotting Scam Gite bookings which usually just "smell wrong" like the "Honeymoon" booking request I received summer last year.

The other week I have to admit that I very nearly got caught out by one that came through from French Entree (who are still happily sending me booking enquiries a year after I didn't renew my trial advert with them!)

Here's the enquiry I received:

Name: Olivier Jean
Email: europe.XXXX@ibelgique.com
Tel: 00225 66 XX XX XX
Rental from : 15/02/2009
Rental to : 15/04/2009
Number of weeks : 8

The Enquiry:

Hello dear one,

I am interested in renting your house for a period of 2 months if possible and starting from 15/02/2009 to 15/04/2009 . please i will be happy to know if there is disponibility of the house, i will like to also know the total price of my bill incase the room is available for the mentioned date above.

Your faithfully,

Jean Olivier.

Tel: 00225 66 XX XX XX.

I have to admit being slightly ill at ease by the slightly odd phrase "disponibility of the house", but after Googling for these words I couldn't find it'd been quoted by any other Gite owners so concluded that it was probably just poor English by Olivier Jean (whoever he/she is).

Unfortunately I couldn't support these dates as we've got some other Gite guests staying in February and we're there ourselves in April, so I was part way through writing an apologetic email to the enquirer when for some reason I went back and looked at the enquiry again.

Maybe it was a sixth-sense or maybe it was the "i will like to" phrase that caused me to re-look at the enquiry, and in particular to check out the telephone number used.

Another Google search brought me to a list of international dialling codes which I searched for dialling code 225, and voila my concerns were realised as I found that 00 225 corresponded to Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast).

Definitely some kind of African scam booking attempt so I've ignored the enquiry and won't be replying (and thus opening up my mailbox to even more junk).

My top-tip therefore is to always check and double-check any unusual booking requests (long durations, short notice, etc) - search for unusual enquiry terms and names on Google, email addresses "look right" and not from a disposable email provider (so no fred99@hotmail.com), and also double-check any telephone numbers given. If in doubt, don't answer.

Scam booking - a "honeymoon present for friends"

Lay My Hat

I've written before about some of the scam holiday gite booking requests that I receive from time to time, but yesterday I received one that almost had me believing it before I checked it out a bit further.

Most of the scam bookings I get via our 'contact us' form are completely obviously rubbish, they're packed full of links to definitely unsavoury websites (I never bother looking at what they are but judging by some of the link titles I can guess they're porn related). Why anyone ever bothers trying to entice me to visit their websites via this means is beyond me, but I'm quite good at pressing the 'Junk' button in Thunderbird when I receive these.

Some days I receive one or two of these junk booking requests, but occasionally I get several in the day, and on a particularly bad day I received nearly 40 of them. My usual tactic is to periodically rename the "contact us" website page so whatever auto-bot is visiting the website and filling in the form will just get a 404 page not found error. This usually reduces the volume for a few months before it's time to apply it again.

Today's "booking enquiry" though was quite different:

Booking enquiry submitted by Glenn King (king_xxxx@yahoo.com) on Tuesday, July 8, 2008 at 01:03

Query: Hi,
I will like to make a reservation for 21 days for friends who will come there for honeymoon its my gift to them since i cannot attend their wedding. Let me know if there is any vacancy for the month of August 29th to September 18TH 2008 or any other dates you have available, I will await your response
Regards,
Glenn King
king_xxxx@yahoo.com

Although it looked 'sort of' right, it did raise my suspicions especially when I realised that Mr King was proposing to buy a Gite booking for someone's honeymoon present in a little over 7 weeks time. I can't imagine anyone in their circumstances wouldn't have their honeymoon already booked, and even if it wasn't, they were unlikely to be able to take 3 weeks off work with such little notice!

With warning bells now firmly switched on I did some exploratory Google searches and didn't find anything, and then I turned to Lay My Hat which is a website forum dedicated to holiday home owners around the world.

A quick search on their forum turned up trumps, several other property owners reporting similar "honeymoon" booking requests with identical wording, even down to the poor English at the beginning ("I will like"). Here's one such example.

Moral of the story is to keep your wits about you as a Gite owner and trust your instinct if things don't "look right".

Mr Glenn King won't be getting any kind of reply from me ...

Lucky lucky me - I've won the lottery (or is that the not-likely-ery ?)

In amongst the mountain of 465 odd emails that I received whilst being away (from which my fave Thunderbird email client helpfully managed to categorise 363 as being spam straight away, leaving me 'only' 100 to wade through) I discovered that I had won the "Yahoo/Msn Lottery Incorperation" (sic - their typo, not mine).

Apparently "Yahoo/MSN and Microsoft Windows collect all the email addresses of the people that are active online" (gosh, sounds a bit big brother to me) and select 5 winners each month, and I'm one of them!!

All I have to do to claim my £900,000 prize is give my name, age, address, sex, next of kin, zip code, occupation, state, nationality and shoe size.

OK I admit it, I lied, they didn't want my shoe size, just all the other stuff and my telephone number and employer.

But wait .... another email .... I've also won the Yahoo! Mail lottery as well, but this time I only picked up £800,000 (I guess Microsoft must subsidise the Yahoo/MSN Lottery a bit more than just Yahoo on their own).

However for this one I don't need to supply anywhere near as much personal information so it must be genuine.

And there's more, I've just found a third email telling me I've £891,934 on the Camelot UK National Lottery. Camelot convincingly have their address at the top of the email and have helpfully enclosed a little form for me to fill in and return.

They do say though to "Be advice to keep your winning information confidential until your claims has been processed and our money remitted to you. This is part of our security protocol to avoid double claiming and unwarranted abuse of this program" so I'm not going to tell you my winning numbers or else you might claim them for yourselves.

They say that good things happen in threes, what are the odds of winning three lotteries in one week ?

Now what shall I spend all my winnings on .....

(Cynic mode off: You'd think that these spammers would learn to be smarter in their spam rubbish and not send the same, or nearly the same, emails out in short succession. Kinda gives the game away, even to the most unobservant recipient).

Spot the scam booking

Received a direct email today about the Gite (which I've slightly obfuscated with X's in case the email addresses are real):

From: "Mr.Morgan XXXX"
Reply-To: morgernXXXX@yahoo.com
Subject: GET BACK TO ME WITH THE TOTAL COST.
To: morganXXXX@yahoo.com

Good Day Sir/Madam,

I need to make reservations for an organisation of three people who will be coming to your country for a programme.They are going to lodge in your place during their stay.Three rooms will be needed from 15th-25th June 2007 and I will like you to provide accomodation for them for the time period. 3 rooms will be needed. Please provide me with the total cost for their stay for 10 nights for 3 people so that reservation will be made immediately. I hope you accept Credit Card Payments.
Get back to me ASAP so that we can proceed with the booking.

Thanks.

This is so obviously a scam attempt that deserves straight to go into the Deleted bin.

Firstly I never leave my email address directly on the Gite website, instead I use a 'contact us' booking enquiry form to cut down on email harvesting by spam-bots. Unfortunately not all other sites I have advertised on are as diligent so some email addresses I use have been 'captured'. Looking at the message source code I could see it was actually sent to one of these addresses rather than the 'to:' address that appears above.

Secondly the English of the 'supposed enquiry is poor, and the text is quite generic. There's nothing in it to indicate what area the three people want to be staying in, nor of the programme details they're coming to see, nor even the country name. If you or I were sending a real booking enquiry it would be more specific about location, country, venue, etc. This email can quite easily be sent to hundreds of other property owners - as the email address used is undoubtedly on a spam list I'm sure it has been.

Finally the email isn't even targetted at the right sort of business. It's written as if I were a hotel renting out rooms, not a holiday Gite.

About the only thing that's missing from this scam (which I've seen on other scam emails I've received is an offer for the 'guests' to pay me more than the rental price and for me to wire back (e.g. using Western Union) the difference. Perhaps if I replied to the email that'd be next. Instead it's the delete key for this one ...

Holiday rental scam warning

I received an email warning earlier in the week from one of the sites I advertise on, vacationrentals.com which I thought worth passing on ...

Several holiday home owners have contacted us regarding a scam booking for a "Christian Summit" conference held near their holiday home.

One owner wrote to us: "A Rev Ken Bryan from the UK made a booking for 11 days in May for a Christian Summit in Rotorua. I became suspicious when both his grammar and spelling were inadequate for such a person. Also a phone call came from him at 4.00 am with a middle eastern accent. He then requested a conversion of the rental into pounds and sent a cheque for 3x the correct amount, requesting the balance be returned by immediate TT to a bank account in the UK..... I cancelled the reservation without any loss and have not heard from them again. Upon checking in Rotorua there were no Christian summits being held."

Fortunately I've not seen this particular scam although I do occasionally receive enquiries that "don't seem right" - usually they're asking to accomodate far more people than we have room for, the English is incredibly poor, or it's for what looks like a scammers email address like johnsmith43@hotmail.com.
What I usually do is register for a one-month disposable email address with shortmail.net and reply back using the temporary reply-to address - that way if it is a scam then I haven't given out my real email address and contributed even further to the mountain of spam and junk mail I already receive.

The email then went on to explain that they've setup a blog to collate reported scam messages (which for some reason has now been suspended by wordpress) and ended with some useful advice to all holiday home owners:

• Use caution and common sense when dealing with any financial transaction
• NEVER wire funds to a distant buyer, via Western Union or any other carrier
• Be wary if the other party wants to use an escrow service such as BidPay or Squaretrade
• NEVER give out personal financial information (bank account number, SSN, eBay/PayPal info, etc.)
• Trust your instincts, and always remember the most important rule -- BUYER BEWARE

So far we've been OK (or maybe just lucky) and all our guests have been genuine - keeping fingers crossed that it remains that way.

Spam blog commenting

From what I read blog spamming seems to becoming more of a problem as more and more people put up spam blogs or clutter up genuine Blogs (like this one!) with comments that attempt to entice you to their website or to gain from your website page ranking. The idea is that they lodge a comment on your blog (which of course is one of the great social networking benefits of Blogging) but in it include a link to their own website which is usually completely unrelated to the original site.

The problem has been partly solved by Blogger and other blog tools automatically implementing the nofollow tag in all comments so that the links from your Blog comments do not contribute to their search engine ranking, and they've also introduced word verification steps where you have to retype a displayed word before you can leave a comment.

I guess my little Blog is getting more popular as I've been increasingly getting more blog spam posted as comments. So far I thought it would be easier for the reader if I didn't turn Blogger's comment verification on, but may have to change my mind about this decision if I'm inundated with spam.

Today I found eight comments on the Blog which when I first saw them I thought they were genuine and nice feedback comments. It's only after I read them a bit closer that I realised they were clearly spam as some of them were very similar, they were completely irrelevant and they were posted to a set of Blog entries from January to February.

For your amusement, here's what they said:

Hey, you have a great blog here! I'm definitely going to bookmark you!
I have a internet banner advertising site/blog. It pretty much covers internet banner advertising related stuff.
Come and check it out if you get time :-)

Hi thanks for your blog, I liked it! I also have a blog/site about advertising firm that covers advertising firm related stuff. Please feel free to visit.

Hi Thanks for your interesting blog. I also have a blog/site, covering advertising solution related stuff. Feel free to visit my advertising solution site.

Hey, you have a great blog here! I'm definitely going to bookmark you!
I have a orlando advertising site/blog. It pretty much covers orlando advertising related stuff.

I just came across your blog and wanted to drop you a note telling you how impressed I was with the information you have posted here.
I also have a web site & blog about yellow page advertising so I know what I'm talking about when I say your site is top-notch!
Keep up the great work!

Hi Thanks for your interesting blog. I also have a blog/site, covering advertising standard related stuff.
Feel free to visit my advertising standard site.

And my personal favourite is:

Hi Thanks for your interesting blog. I also have a blog/site, covering advertising inflatable related stuff. Feel free to visit my advertising inflatable site.

They were all linked to the same (extremely dull) website. I've now deleted all these comments but please let me know if you really want the address of where you can get details of Orlando/inflatable/yellow page advertising ...

Spam booking enquiry

So when is a booking enquiry not a booking enquiry ?

When it's a spam booking !

Logged onto my email yesterday and was excited to see a 'giteinbrittany.com booking enquiry' email. When I designed the website I was quite keen to ensure that I didn't get any more spam than I do already so I deliberately didn't put my email address on the website. Instead I wrote a contact us to enquire about Gite availability page which would behind the scenes email the enquiry details to me but without having to display my email address anywhere on the site.

On the whole this has worked reasonably well. I still get a few emails addressed to admin@websitename but I think it's far less than I would get if I had the email address in plain text just sitting there to be harvested by all the spam engines of the world ! Only downside is that prospective guests have to fill in a form to contact us but this doesn't seem to have been a problem to anyone as far as I know.

Anyway, the "booking enquiry" email I received looked like this:

Booking enquiry submitted by Richard (richardXXXXXX20006@msn.com)

Address: 3445 minchester steet usa

Telephone: 448717205190

Adults: 2

SmallChildren: 22

Query:

MY NAME IS BEN I AM A MODEL AGENT I CAME ABOUT YOUR
ADVERT ON
THE INETERNET SO A FRIEND ADVISE ME TO CONTACT YOU
OVER THE
ACCOMODATION, THERE ARE TWO OF MY FEMALE MODELS THAT
ARE HAVING
A MODELING PROGRAMED IN YOUR AVENUES FROM MAY 30TH
TILL JUNE 30th 2006 FOR 4 WEEKS SO ALL I WANT NOW IS JUST
THE RENT COST FOR
THAT PERIOD ALSO I WILL LIKE TO KNOW IF CHEQUE
PAYMENT COULD BE
ACCEPTED BY U, ONCE I GET THE COST.

PAYMENT WILL COMMENCE IMMEDIATELY.

HOPE TO HEAR FROM YOU SOONEST.

I've obscured the email address and removed all the blank lines (the original email was all double spaced) but the extensive use of capitals, interesting spellings ('inEternet'), grammar ('a modeling programed in your avenues' - wonder if he means modelling session in my street ??), inconsistency of email address (Robert....) and name ('Ben') and everything else is just as I received it.

To me this just looks so obviously like an attempt by someone who's not a native English speaker to do some kind of dodgy deal. My guess is that if I replied I'd have some kind of "processing fee" to pay or the cheque would bounce. I just don't have time for things like this so I've ignored it.

Oh and Robert, if you were genuinely looking to book, we've already got a booking for the first two weeks of June so we can't accommodate your female models (and 22 small children) at that time anyway, sorry.