Email purporting to come from Norton Prime: ORDER#31438
Gillian Snoxall
check Positive experience
Jason Davies
Dear Gillian,
This looks like a scam. Firstly, you've never heard of it (always a good clue). But there are many others, for instance a US phone number for a UK person, the gmail address it's sent from is gibberish, then the fact that they claim to have already taken the money.
I think you can safely ignore it. What we should do regardless of whether we get scams by email is to glance at bank statements when they come in and look for strange activity. For instance if someone had somehow got access to your accounts, they typically take small amounts regularly over a period of time before realising you are not checking, then trying for larger ones. Banks are quite good at spotting unusual ones, so they can get a fair amount by taking a tenner each month and being patient.
But this is a scam, don't worry. Keep an eye on your bank statements and query with the bank if anything odd does occur.
Cheers,
J
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Cheers,
Jason
Gillian Snoxall
Jason Davies
You're welcome. It's very disconcerting but it's not new, it's a perennial human problem... I remember my (54 now) mother (obviously older!) saying to me as a kid in the 70s or 80s that at one point they had to ban adverts in newspapers that said things like "Last chance to send £10 to..." and people would actually send a cheque.
This seems weird when you describe it from the outside but (if I can dip into my academic voice for a minute), there is a lot of discussion about how the mind works. Many people maintain, based on good evidence, that the instinctive human reaction is to believe things first, then realise they should not believe them. It can be very quick but still (they argue) happens in that order until you're really familiar with the kind of thing you're dealing with.
Un-believing things requires experience, background information, and so on. So we all need to help each other with reality checks to get the hang of it. Before you know it, you're the one saying to a friend 'that looks like a scam' as you get familiar with it. The important thing is to ask, and then to understand the explanations so you can internalise them.
Because the other aspect to 'believing things first' is that it doesn't apply when it's something happening to other people. It's a lot easier to look at someone else's situation and see what's going on.
I once reset my ebay password, went to my email, a message came in about my ebay account (I saw it arrive), so I went to fill it in to sort out the password. When it asked for my PIN on my bank card, I started to wonder (and even then, it took me a few minutes). The scam email had just got lucky, arriving when I was expecting one from ebay. Thankfully, I hesitated long enough to get my wits together, and I appreciated the fact that my bank always says in emails 'we will never ask you for your PIN' in plain language.
So it could be any of us at any time, we just need to be distracted or uncertain;)
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Cheers,
Jason
