Everybody receives unsolicited emails that claim the prospect of a bargain or something for free.  Some of them appear to come from legitimate sources before and after being opened.  Messages in these emails urge people to verify their account information, provide their login details, update their credit card or bank account numbers, etc.  Most of the emails contain links, and victims are requested to click on them.

Within scam emails, the website addresses of the links may look totally normal, but they typically are not.  A trick to find out is to hover your mouse pointer, which usually will turn into a hand over the website link (without clicking on it), and the actual address of the link should appear at the bottom of the screen.  If that address is different from what the address of the link appears to be, it most likely goes to a fradulent or malicious web address and should NOT be clicked on.  If you do so, chances are that you will get ripped off or your computer will be hacked.  Also, any attachments accompanying the email or the message should NOT be downloaded.

In my email plan, virtually all scam emails are funneled into my Spam folder.  Occasionally, a regular email that I do want to open and read will end up in the Spam folder, so I check that folder a couple of times a day to make sure that hasn’t happened.  Usually, the information in the “From” and “Subject” columns appears normal.  That is to be expected, since most scammers try to make this information seem legitimate so that people will open those emails.  Here are a few examples:

A trick that I frequently use for emails in my Scam folder is to hover my mouse pointer over names in the “From” column.  The pointer will turn into a hand over the name, and the email address of the sender will appear under the hand.  Over 99% of the time, I can tell by looking at the sender’s address that it is NOT anyone I know and it is NOT an email that I want to click on and open.

Occasionally, if I do open a spam email and hover my pointer over every link in the email, I virtually always see that all of the links go to the same address.  That is a HUGE RED FLAG!  It is a way to get the viewer to click on at least one of the links, which NEVER is a good idea in a scam email.  Incidentally, it is not a good idea to click on the UNSUBSCRIBE link in a scam email or you most likely will regret doing that.

During 2020, I have received several hundred emails from this address: info@cortseren.com.  That is by far the most number of emails that I’ve ever received from the same source, including from people that I know.  Without actually opening an email, I can right-click on the Subject of an email and then click on “View Message Source” in the list that pops up to see the contents of the email.  I viewed a handful of the info@cortseren.com emails that way, and I clearly could see that they were spam emails.

Finally, on November 1, I sent an email to info@cortseren.com (with a Subject stating “your emails”) saying that I had received hundreds of unsolicited emails from that address.  You can click here to read the email.  I sent a repeat email to that address on November 8.

After sending the first email, I received 57 additional emails from info@cortseren.com over the next two weeks.  On November 16 alone, 12 emails were sent from that address.  Click here to see the list.  So that day, I went to the following address, at the Whois site, to see the cortseren.com information (I have taken a screen shot of that page and enclosed the Domain Name and also the Abuse Contact Email address, further down the page, in red):

NameCheap, Inc. is the name of the company with whom cortseren.com is registered.  So, on November 16, I sent an email to the abuse email address: abuse@namecheap.com.  You can click here to read that email.

Well...since I sent that complaint email to abuse@namecheap.com on November 16, I have not received EVEN ONE email from info@cortseren.com.   I do not know if NameCheap contacted the owner of the cortseren.com domain or simply canceled that domain and the associated email address.  In any case, I wish I had sent that complaint email many months ago when the annoying scam emails began, but I will keep that in mind in the future.