Lay My Hat

Hi again,

My apologies for delay in reply.
I am happy to advise that we successfully decided to book your property.
Please see in the attached reservation request the dates, names and phone numbers of our family members so you can edit the booking confirmation properly.
If the dates are booked already please let me know so we can work something out. If something else is needed please advise.
Sincerly

Sent from my iPad

(PDF WAS HERE)

710K View Download

I've never heard of her and I have no record of and enquiry from her.

I trust you did not open the PDF! It was probably virus loaded or at least malware loaded so they could get control of your PC and access information such as account passwords etc.

If you did open it you should consider changing all your login and password information for bank and mail accounts - but do it from another PC and meanwhile thoroughly virus check and malware check your own PC to see if it is infected.

Nope! I'm familiar with this type of scam

I had one from her too, never heard of her and deleted it once I saw there was an attachment.

Definitely a scam

We had an inquiry from someone calling themselves Bill, asking about one of the few weeks when the house isn't already booked. It looked as if it might be a scam, since it didn't specify the number of people in the party. We replied cautiously, asking about the number of people, and got an answer with exactly the same wording as Sam V reports and attaching a file with the letters 'pdf' on it, which 'Bill' claimed had in it the information We wanted. As far as I know PDFs are pretty harmless but we doubted whether this one really was a harmless PDF and we have deleted the e-mail. Reading this correspondence makes me convinced that we did the right thing.

Old Bill wrote: As far as I know PDFs are pretty harmless .

You would perhaps think that but its all too easy to disguise a dangerous file by simply changing the three letters after the dot. You then think its a PDF but it turns out to be an EXE or something else and simpy by clicking on it you stir it into action. you did the right thing - delete and then empty your rubbish bin so it does not exist anywhere on your system - people often forget to do that last bit and therfore leave a potential problem ready to spring into action later!

I received another enquiry from Sylvia again this morning, same wording only this time posted from her Blackberry.

Dear all,

I received a very similar message from a Lucas Moreno for an 11 day period in June, but initially asking if the cottage was available, what the price was and whether we used a booking form. Once I replied, they said they wanted to book and attached a 'booking form' with similar worded email to that above. As I'm new to all this I rather naively clicked on the link which took me to a page asking me to log back into my email account. At this point I got suspicious and closed the link down. They have now emailed again asking me to click on a link to see if the location is as it is in the map, so I'm presuming that as they didn't get what they wanted last time, they are trying again. Am just hoping that they haven't installed anything on my computer but will be running a full scan in the very near future.

It's a grim lesson to have learned, but hopefully not too much damage has been done and I now know how to check a link before clicking on it and don't think that I will be opening up anything from potential guests until I've seen a deposit!
Jenny