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Eddie98's avatar
Eddie98
Up to speed
2 years ago
Solved

Trying to forward a VM phishing team a phishing email but it won’t send

Hi

My wife received a very authentic looking email this morning to her blueyonder account purporting to be from VM although it is definitely a phishing email.

She’d like to forward it to the phishing email address at VM but for some reason it just sits in her outbox and won’t send and she gets the error message as shown in the image below. We have checked the address - phishing@virginmedia.com - which is correct. She is able to send (& forward) emails from this account having just tested this with me at the same time.

She is using Apple’s email client on her iPad. Anyone know why she can’t send this email to VM’s phishing team but can happily send emails elsewhere from the same account?


  • theEddie98 wrote:

    Thank you. The link to the phishing update is really useful so will check this if we have any more. I’m not 100% certain about the explanation for why my wife’s email client stopped her from sending VM a phishing email. The error message I posted isn’t consistent with the problem she encountered.


    FWIW, as coenoby mentioned earlier this issue is due to how Mail on iOS or iPadOS behaves when reporting errors, i.e. it is does not report the error as returned by the SMTP server but instead displays the generic message:

    Sending the same message via Mail on macOS and the following error is shown, note highlighted text:

    She can send other emails without issue because they do not result in the SMTP returning an error.

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  • coenoby's avatar
    coenoby
    Very Insightful Person

    Eddie98 wrote:

    She is using Apple’s email client on her iPad. Anyone know why she can’t send this email to VM’s phishing team but can happily send emails elsewhere from the same account?


    The most likely reason is that Virgin Media already know about that phishing email and their spam filters are blocking it from being forwarded from their servers.

    The error message from the mail app is clearly confusing because there is obviously nothing wrong with the email settings in the app if your wife can send other emails. Sadly, email apps usually give vague default error messages rather than the real reason the app is failing to send the email.

    Just for future reference there is another part of this forum https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Security-matters/bd-p/Internet_Security where VM publish phishing emails that purport to come from VM. Check out the posts headed "Latest phishing news dd/mm/yy" on that part of the forum.

    Coenoby

    • Jodi_S's avatar
      Jodi_S
      Forum Team

      Hi Eddie98,

      Thanks for posting on our community forum. As our valued member coenoby has already answered your query, did you manage to check the community link offered.

      If you have any further queries, please pop back here and we'll be happy to assist.

      Kind regards Jodi. 

  • Thank you. The link to the phishing update is really useful so will check this if we have any more. I’m not 100% certain about the explanation for why my wife’s email client stopped her from sending VM a phishing email. The error message I posted isn’t consistent with the problem she encountered.

    • 用心棒's avatar
      用心棒
      Very Insightful Person

      theEddie98 wrote:

      Thank you. The link to the phishing update is really useful so will check this if we have any more. I’m not 100% certain about the explanation for why my wife’s email client stopped her from sending VM a phishing email. The error message I posted isn’t consistent with the problem she encountered.


      FWIW, as coenoby mentioned earlier this issue is due to how Mail on iOS or iPadOS behaves when reporting errors, i.e. it is does not report the error as returned by the SMTP server but instead displays the generic message:

      Sending the same message via Mail on macOS and the following error is shown, note highlighted text:

      She can send other emails without issue because they do not result in the SMTP returning an error.

      -- 
      I'm a Very Insightful Person, I'm here to share knowledge, I don't work for Virgin Media. Learn more
      Have I helped? Select Mark as Helpful Answer or 🖒 Kudos to say thanks

      • Eddie98's avatar
        Eddie98
        Up to speed

        Thank you and apologies to @coenoby for not initially understanding their response. This does now make sense to us!

        I think the phishing thread on the VM community is useful but would suggest an image or screengrab of the emails would help rather than text as it is hard to decipher and compare.

  • 用心棒's avatar
    用心棒
    Very Insightful Person

    That is a good idea that hopefully Virgin Media will take onboard

  • I have recently been getting a rogue e-mail from so called 'Duncan Watkins', delivered to junk. I forwarded it to Virgin (from whence it bounced back) and to Action Fraud. I understand that Virgin may already know about this attempted scam but why does it not stop this e-mail being delivered? Now we are back to 'normal' working after the holidays, hopefully it will be sorted.  

    • Alex_RM's avatar
      Alex_RM
      Forum Team

      Hi ahrbee,

      Thanks for posting, and sorry  you've been receiving some phishing emails. 

      You should be able to forward this here

      Let us know if there are any issues doing this.

      Alex_Rm

  • As I said, I did forward this junk to Virgin's phishing e-mail address [phishing@virginmedia.com]. It bounced back and it has done so again today. So, if Virgin already knows this is junk (it is very obviously junk), why does it not stop it?

    • Kath_P's avatar
      Kath_P
      Forum Team

      Hi ahrbee, 

      Thanks for coming back to us on this one. If you get a bounce back error when trying to send the message, then we are already aware of the email and have taken steps to ensure the email is blocked on our platform.
      For more information on phishing and how to spot a spam email, please read this this help article. Known phishing emails purporting to be from Virgin Media are also listed on this section of the community here

      Apologies once again for the inconvenience. 

      Thanks, 

  • I accept that VM is aware of this scam e-mail so my question is: why does VM not stop it? VM has been aware for a few weeks but still this junk still gets through. The 'Duncan Watkins' junk is very obvious, goes into my junk folder and gets erased; but I have just had another junk e-mail, potentially more dangerous, which it would seem VM is aware of but let through. I don't get worried about this stuff but I imagine others might. Better if VM, when aware, acted to stop it at source. I hope report@phishing.gov.uk does a better job; but who knows?

    • coenoby's avatar
      coenoby
      Very Insightful Person

      ahrbee wrote:

       I hope report@phishing.gov.uk does a better job; but who knows?


      To be honest, forwarding scam emails to the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) via that address is not necessarily going to result in an immediate block on the emails themselves. I think they have a more long term objective.

      The major part of what the NCSC do is to to investigate and take down the providers of the scam email addresses along with the phishing websites that those scam emails link to. To do that they need people to report the scam emails.

      Coenoby