Surely you can filter fake VM spam?

[argiel]

I see from other questions that I’m not the only one receiving phishing spam claiming to be from Virginmedia. Luckily it’s mostly of poor quality and unconvincing.

Surely, if VM are doing any spamming filtering at all, these should be among the items easiest to spot?

Simple analogy, if I’m a PA screening the boss’s phone calls, if someone phones up claiming to be me, I know it’s a fake.

That’s maybe over-simplifying it, but surely VM could do better. It would also save them the trouble of having to deal with calls about hacked accounts.

[coenoby]

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@argiel wrote:

That’s maybe over-simplifying it, but surely VM could do better. It would also save them the trouble of having to deal with calls about hacked accounts.

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As I understand it Virgin Media use filtering software supplied and managed by a specialist company but you are right, it could be better. However, spam filtering is not as easy as it might appear

It's an arms race between the good guys and the bad guys. The bad guys are always looking for new ways to beat the filters and the good guys have the problem that if they are too strict their customers will complain loudly that emails that are "obviously genuine" are being identified as spam. In fact there have been lots of posts complaining about that on this forum over the years.

One thing that you can do when you get one of these phishing emails that claims to come from VM is to forward it to phishing@virginmedia.com. However, you may well find that your email will be blocked because it has been identified as spam. In that case it does suggest that VM's spam filters already been updated to catch those examples,   You can look here for more information  https://netreport.virginmedia.com/netreport/  

However, the best thing to do with any phishing email is to forward it to report@phishing.gov.uk. That goes to the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/  and they will investigate it.

Coenoby

[Serena_C · Accepted solution]

Hi @argiel

Thank you for making this post regarding spam emails you have received, claiming to be Virgin Media. I'm sorry to heat you've been receiving these emails. Have you take a look at this link https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Security-matters/bd-p/Internet_Security for further advice on scam emails and phishing?

Thank you for your feedback regarding spam filtering, I will pass this on to the relevant team now. 

Kind regards,

Serena