UK Parking Control

[88V8]

Received a somewhat illiterate email alleging that I owe £90 in parking charges.
From what I've read, UKPC does exist but seems to have no power to enforce parking fines.
On the date in question, both myself and OH were ill, and not driving anywhere. And anyway, it feels like a scam.
When I click on the link to the alleged offence, I get a website with a capcha, at which point I ceased to proceed.

Any experience?

V8

[Slarti]

I had half a dozen purporting to be from them in the last couple of weeks, all in the spam traps.

I looked at the header of one and it was from a .ru website.

It is a current scam going round.

I wouldn't have opened it.

Slarti

[Alaric]

Received a somewhat illiterate email alleging that I owe £90 in parking charges.

There would have to be somewhere a database which associated your email address with your car registration. Otherwise it's obviously a phishing attempt as they wouldn't know your car registration. The DVLA can associate addresses with car regs, but would they know an email as well?

That's a question I ask those call centres who ring up and say my computer is running slowly. How did they associate an IP address with a phone number?

[Gengulphus]

Received a somewhat illiterate email alleging that I owe £90 in parking charges.
From what I've read, UKPC does exist but seems to have no power to enforce parking fines.
On the date in question, both myself and OH were ill, and not driving anywhere. And anyway, it feels like a scam.
When I click on the link to the alleged offence, I get a website with a capcha, at which point I ceased to proceed.

It's a bit late now - you've either got away with it or the damage has been done - but for future reference: DON'T click on such links. They might just be attempts to scam you out of some money, but equally they might be attempts to download malware on to your machine...

That applies not just to links in emails from unknown organisations, but also to unexplained links in emails from friends. E.g. a few years ago, I got an email from a friend of mine, whose subject was "Hi David" (David being my real-life first name) and that consisted of the line "Hi David", a link and a signature that was his real-life first name. This didn't ring true - we hadn't been in contact for a while. and I would have expected something more in the way of actual words given that it was re-establishing contact after a bit of a gap. And so I checked with him, using an address I had in an old email - and he hadn't sent it: it was probably all constructed from the limited information that he had contacted me in the past (most likely because his contacts list had been hacked at some point) and guessing our first names from our email addresses (not difficult for either of them, as it happens). What the link would have done if I'd clicked it, I don't know - safer just to delete the whole lot and avoid any risk of inadvertently clicking it in future! But I doubt very much that it would have been beneficial to me!

Basically, only click on links in emails if you have positive reason to believe they are genuine - and knowing a few personal details like your name and a friend's name is not positive enough reason! And if you have friends with a habit of sending emails that consist only of a link and some generic text before/after it that doesn't supply a positive reason to believe it's genuine, train them out of that habit!

Gengulphus

[Arborbridge]

As a general rule, anything with a subject title like "Hi David" is 99% likely to be a scam! Unless, you have friends who regularly use that sort of approach, it's exceedingly uplikely to be anything pleasant.


Arb.