Receiving phishing emails, but VM stopping me reporting because they’re spam 🤦‍♂️

[JPL8]

Perhaps someone from VM can explain this. Why am I receiving so many spam emails lately? When I try to report some of them to Apple or Amazon I get this message:

“Cannot send the message using the sever virginmedia.com. Sending the message content to the server failed. The server response was: SPAM Content Found (VM603)"

Virgin, if you can detect they're spam when I try to report it, then why aren’t you blocking it in the first place?

[Nathan_B]

Hi there @JPL8 👋 Welcome back to our forum and thanks for your post.

Sorry to see you've been having issues reporting the emails as spam. Just to confirm, is this when trying to report them here?

Let us know.

Regards

Nathan

[JPL8]

Hi Nathan. Thanks for getting back to me so quickly. 

So the issue is that if it’s one of the VM / 02 spam emails mentioned in the Phishing News pinned posts I can report those to report@phishing.gov.uk and phishing@virginmedia.com with no problem at all.

However, I’m also getting a lot of phishing emails pretending to be from other organisations and some of them I can’t report to companies like Amazon or Apple to deal with because the VM mail server says I’m sending spam (even if I save the email as an attachment) 🤷‍♂️. Which I think is weird because if it’s being blocked by your spam filters when I send it, I can’t understand why it’s not being blocked before I receive it in the first place. That makes no sense.

It’s getting frustrating to be honest because I’m getting up to 8 emails a day pretending to be from VM / 02 and when I get genuine ones now (like your reply notification) they’re going straight to my junk folder.

Not to mention all the phishing emails supposedly from Screwfix, Amazon, Apple etc that my anti-virus software is picking up containing trojans. This is a problem that seems to have escalated since the big email outage a while back. I never received any spam before then in all the years I’ve been with VM.

[John_GS]

Morning @JPL8 

Thanks for coming back to us.

Have you checked this article which should help

[JPL8]

Thanks … but that doesn’t really explain the point I was making:

I’m also getting a lot of phishing emails pretending to be from other organisations and some of them I can’t report to companies like Amazon or Apple to deal with because the VM mail server says I’m sending spam (even if I save the email as an attachment) 🤷‍♂️. Which I think is weird because if it’s being blocked by your spam filters when I send it, I can’t understand why it’s not being blocked before I receive it in the first place. That makes no sense.

You’re letting spam / phishing in, but you’re blocking me from forwarding it on to the relevant companies. So if you can block me from sending it, why can’t you block it coming in? Especially when some emails are pretending to come from Virgin Media.

[ALF28]

I also reported spam and unknown dodgy emails for many years but it will continue forever it never stops as the spammers just keep changing the sender address, I also get the fake VM emails, I had one today that a stated in the email it had tracking pixel.

I suspect the spammers probably read the VM posts themselves.

I now simply manage my emails better by filtering and using folders for genuine email senders to separate out from the spam emails. 

Some have base 64 content and shortform links to unknown websites.

These email are designed to get past spam filters and could corrupt computers if opened or any thing clicked on or downloaded such as trojans etc.. I just avoid them, and only interact with genuine emails, if you check the source the header will give the IP address which will identify the host to see if it is genuine.

[Zach_R]

Hi @JPL8,

I do apologise. Have you tried adjusting your spam filters and settings to reduce these from coming through? You can find more details here.

Thanks,
 

[JPL8]

You’ve sent me exactly the same link that John_GS sent. To be clear, it’s not about my filters and settings — they’re all on and set up. In fact, I’ve had so many fake VM emails now, they’re all getting filtered straight into junk or the bin, so I missed your reply up until now.

My point is: Virgin Media’s filters are letting phishing emails through to me pretending to be from organisations like Apple, but the same Virgin Media filters block me from forwarding them to Apple to report the phishing attempt. How does that help anyone?

If you can block me reporting the malicious emails, then why can’t you stop me receiving them?

[Akua_A]

Thank you for clarifying this @JPL8 

You can try reporting the emails to phishing@virginmedia.com who can look into this. Please let us know if you need any further help.

Thanks,

[JPL8]

I give up. I don’t think the forum team are bothering to read what I’ve said so far in this thread.

I’ve already said that I can report emails to phishing@virginmedia.com but if I try to report an Apple related phishing email to reportphishing@apple.com then you block my forwarded / attached email as spam. So a scammer can send me a phishing email, but you block my attempts to report it. That makes no sense.

I’d like to be able to forward phishing attempts to the right people because I think that (based on the feedback that I’ve had here so far), it’s much more likely that Apple are going to take action than VM.