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

[Eddie98]

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?

[coenoby]

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@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?

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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]

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. 

[Eddie98]

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 · Accepted solution]

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the@Eddie98 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.

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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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[Eddie98]

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]

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

[ahrbee]

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]

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

[ahrbee]

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?