Of all the spam I get the phishing ones piss me off the most. So if I get one associated with eBay or Paypal, I forward it to spoof@ebay/paypal.com.
I dunno if does any good or not. They always answer me and thank me and tell me that I’m helping them crack down. But it makes me feel better.
Do you bother forwarding such things or just delete them?
Yes! It only takes a minute.
Yes - it might not get the scammers caught, but I believe the companies affected do take action to get the phishing sites shut down - hopefully that translates to fewer people being able to be scammed (i.e. by the time they click the link, the phishing site is dead), and less income for the scammers.
Yes, and Bank of America, and anyone else I can figure out who it goes to.
No, its utterly pointless- if there were a finite amount of phony schemes out there and you could wipe them all out with enough dilligent reporting, then it be worthwhile. But in reality, with the billions of possible addresses out there, you stop one, ten more pop up, so its a never ending cycle, like reporting spam to your admin at work- they block z245ssj@smfkfey.com, and the sender sends from sdjoksa@1as4f5.com instead.
That’s not quite true - setting up the phishing site (the web page that will capture your personal details) isn’t nearly as easy as inventing a fake sender’s email address. Assuming that eBay/PayPal and the banks do actually manage to get the ISPs to pull the sites, then it is making life harder for the scammers.
Phishing sites are usually short-lived, so the chance exists that my receipt of one is in the first wave. Therefore, I think it could be useful to the proper authorities to know about it, and forwarding it to them is easy.
However, my incoming mail servier is different from outgoing. The incoming ISP filter is less good than the outgoing one, so every time I try to forward one, it gets trapped by the outgoing ISP, flagged as spam/phish and I can’t send it. Like a Roach Motel, they check in, but don’t check out. I’ve complained to Charter communications, but they say they impose that filter on all customers and can’t make an exception. Obviously they are trying to avoid having their customers the source of such spam, whether origiinated ot relayed.
A better filter would take into account quantity as well as content. I have no objection to being filtered and prevented from sending a few million phishes, but just one isn’t creating a big problem for anyone.
If security were my primary business, I wouldn’t be able to use Charter, but would have to find a service that wasn’t so big brotherish. But in my case, it’s annoying, but not worth paying for another account.