Companies House scam email

[Nuno]

If you get an email which appears to be from Companies House about a complaint/form lodged against your company Do not open it. It's a phishing scam, and quite a well made one.
Companies House say:

"Companies House will never ask you to disclose personal or payment information by email. If you have any doubt that an email you receive from Companies House is genuine, please do not follow any links, open any attachments, disclose any personal details or respond to it."

http://www.companieshouse.gov.uk/securityAdvice/index.shtml

 

[10032012]

If you get an email which appears to be from Companies House about a complaint/form lodged against your company Do not open it. It's a phishing scam, and quite a well made one.
Companies House say:

"Companies House will never ask you to disclose personal or payment information by email. If you have any doubt that an email you receive from Companies House is genuine, please do not follow any links, open any attachments, disclose any personal details or respond to it."

http://www.companieshouse.gov.uk/securityAdvice/index.shtml

In addition to the banking ones everyone gets these days, I get so many from Companies House, HMRC and even ASA - on a daily basis! Then there is the courier companies... all fake phishing scams.

What annoys me most however is the Government who in recent times have accepted electronic communications (i.e. emails) as valid official forms of communication. The simple thing is to keep letters as formal notices so people can just learn to exclude all emails pretending to be from Government as false... but people do have to work out whether they are genuine, especially with this Government Gateway nonsense.

I didn't have to work out whether these emails I get are fake because of the following:-
1) No courier assignments
2) No government agencies know this email address
3) I am not with that bank

However, when it comes to chance, when the Government or bank does know your email, it makes it so much easier for people to fool for it.

 

[LianneF]

I got that last week and did download the attachment, it was just some text. AVG didn't pick anything up, deleted it now but I didn't see the point as it wasn't asking me to ring or login?

 

[altwebdesign]

Always getting ones from HMRC, they never even address it to me personally just to "dear sirs" or "dear business owner"

 

[Bill1954]

Get them all, they are all marked as junk and now go straight to the spam folder.

 

[10032012]

Always getting ones from HMRC, they never even address it to me personally just to "dear sirs" or "dear business owner"

Yeah, non-personalised emails are a sign of a scam but I should point out to others if you have a first.last@~ email address, I know some of the HMRC ones will parse the to address to extract what it thinks is a name. Also, people can buy lists with that data (including linkedin scrapes etc) but generally they are very careless and send duplicates - they might get 1 in 1000 people, so it works better to not use proper lists.. although would increase conversion, thank goodness they aren't that bright.

Some HMRC ones seem to be phishing whilst others I have received are solely wanting the person to open the dropper attachment so they can download all sorts of trojan horses and viruses. This is worse than the typical hmrc.gov.uk-89gje89.abc324.ext like phishing ones, as not only can it mean keyloggers and the like... it can even point the official domain to the scammer site - although the latter is difficult to achieve now.

It depends entirely on the user, their understanding and their attitude - many still don't look for the padlock or check the website address - solely focusing on the page design and curious enough to want to open every email attachment! The biggest concern I have is, most scammers do not intend to make something look 100% authentic... they like adding "clues" (bad spelling and grammar, incorrect legals, some form of message, funny/silly full names) as it makes it worse for the victim when they realise. Seems to still trick many people though.

 

[JonathanSEO]

Seen a lot of these floating around lately. For some reason I see them as more believable than the bank account ones.

Won't surprise me if a few get duped.

 

[adamo]

I've actually just started getting these about a week or so ago, will block the IP address they're coming from if I get anymore.

It's fairly obvious that they're phishing emails to me, but I can understand how some people are falling for them.

 

[Anonymouse72]

I got that last week and did download the attachment, it was just some text. AVG didn't pick anything up, deleted it now but I didn't see the point as it wasn't asking me to ring or login?

the point is to get you to open the attachment, which then loads a virus on to your PC, some info here.

just had this email today & it's very convincing . it's only the fact that it's got an attachment that rang alarm bells.

 

[Newchodge]

The latest seem to purport to be from Fedex Support, entitled Your rewards Order has shipped. The attachment is called Order History, presumably to dupe someone into thinking - I don't remember ordering anything, I wonder what is coming.

 

[Bluebird99]

I've just had the Companies House one, it does look fairly genuine. The e-mail address is correct and also their telephone no. is correct also.

What raised my suspicion is I noticed that where it says to: it was not my e-mail address (similar to mine).

I've also had the Fedex one quite a few times during the last couple of weeks.

Anything sent with a zip file sets my alarm bells ringing.

 

[HGSecurity]

I have had no less than TEN of these emails this morning

4 from 'Companies House', 4 from 'HMRC' and 2 from 'Fedex', but they all go straight to the junk folder now so I just have to delete them. They are obviously the 'in thing' at the moment, but easy enough to spot if you are paying attention.