Greg's Corner

How to spot a scammer by their email address

While no tip is guaranteed to be 100% accurate all the time here is a tip on how to spot a scammer by their email address.

While scammers can use free email services like GMail or Yahoo a recent trend by overseas scammers is to use ‘off brand’ email addresses. A number of the addresses seem to have some kind of connection with the United Kingdom (UK) including proclaiming to be fans of a number of football teams (soccer) from the English Premier League. Another set of email addresses have various names of occupations or that they belong to some kind of car club.

This is not to say that scammers won’t use free email services commonly used in the US. A good tip in that instance is to be wary addresses that seem to be a random string of characters rather than something that reflects a name. Also be wary of email addresses that have suffixes that indicate they’re from overseas such as .uk or .in for example.

Again, no tip is guaranteed to be effective at all times but with a little bit of knowledge your online buying and selling experience can be a better one.