A new batch of scam emails purporting to confirm your order with Yes Asia (YesAsia.com) and Play.com went out this week. The scam relies on your freaking out when you see confirmation for an order you did not place, so that you will click the link to see “the order”, but of course, the link really goes somewhere else – in this case to some bad stuff being hosted on the iafrica.com website (in the case of our sample, it goes to “http://newsletters.iafrica.com/servlet/link/33/1082/140693/41003”).

Countless people have opened their email this week to be told that “The person described above is charged as follows” in what claims to be a traffic ticket with the “violation” of “Speed Over 55 Zone” Examples we’ve seen have supposedly come from the New York State Polic (such as from automailer.-093@nyc.gov), but it doesn’t matter where it comes from, it’s not real, and the included file is not your ticket – it’s a virus. Don’t open it!

The only way that you could have missed the “1 trick of a tiny belly” or “One tip to a tiny belly” ads that have been everywhere – absolutely everywhere – on the Internet would be if you hadn’t been on the Internet yourself. Well it turns out that those “1 tip” ads, some of which tout “Cut down a bit of your belly everyday by following this 1 weird old tip”, are part of a massive network of scams which the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has uncovered.

Twitter has been the vector for a flood of work-from-home scam spams this week, as followers of hacked accounts found dozens of copies of the “I snagged $217 in just a few hours online. learned how to do it from {link to scam}” type of spam coming at them via direct message. The link goes to a faked NBC article that touts “How did this stay at home mom make $13900+/Month.. We Investigate..” and that cleverly makes note of the geographic location (geolocation) of your IP address and customizes the article to make it seem as if the single mom is from your own town.

Copyright infringement is wrong, and it’s darned easy to do on the Internet. But lots of website proprietors publish images for which they have purchased the right to display the images, often from a stock photo site. So you can imagine their surprise when they get a demand letter from Getty Images, stating that they are guilty of copyright infringement under U.S. Title 17 (the Copyright Act) and that they must provide “payment for the attached demand amount” if they cannot produce a valid license. Is the Getty Images demand letter a scam? Well, not exactly.

If a link to “activate dislike button” shows up on your Facebook page – do not, Do Not, DO NOT click that link! The scam link, spreading like wildfire, appears as a post on your wall that says “Facebook just added the dislike button! Click on ‘Activate Dislike Button’ below to enable it on your account!” Of course, the FB dislike button is another Facebook scam, carrying with it a Facebook virus and a bonus of malware that it downloads to your computer in the background.

From our “Why online scams work” department, a woman (if she is indeed a woman) who was in an online relationship with an Illinois man for over two years has managed to scam at least $200,000 from the man. The scam came to light when the 48-year-old man from Naperville, Illinois contacted police because his ‘girlfriend’ had disappeared right after he wired her the last of the $200,000, and he feared she had been kidnapped.

A new version of the years-old ‘attempted abduction and rape in Target parking lot’ scam is making the rounds. “NEW  RAPE SCAM!  PLEASE READ!” the headline screams, going on to exhort the readers to “Please  pass on to all your girlfriends, wives, etc. Just  to be on the safe side. Please be aware  and pass  it on to anyone you think this will help.”. This newest version even says that the info checks out on mythbusting website Snopes where, in fact, it absolutely doesn’t check out.

There is a horrific scam going around that uses just about every trick in the book – and effectively at that – to get you to send the scammers some money. It uses social engineering, urgency, Facebook hacking, and email hacking, and looks so genuine that we have no doubt that many have fallen for it. It comes from your friend’s actual account, and starts out by saying “This message may be coming to you as a surprise..” It then goes on to say that “we were mugged” and that the muggers stole “all our cash, credit cards and cellphone but thank God we still have our lives”, and then begs “I need you to help me out with a loan to settle our bills here…” It sounds so real – and after all it comes right from your friend’s account – how can you refuse? But refuse you must, because it is a scam.

Nigerian scammers have taken Internet scams to a new high (or low): selling your house, without your knowledge, and having the proceeds go to them. All done remotely, primarily via the Internet, with a little fax and phone thrown in. Of course, now that Nigerian scammers have pulled this off successfully (yes, successfully – just ask Roger Mildenhall about the Perth, Australia house that used to be his), we’re sure that other scammers around the world will be trying it.

If you got a confirmation of resetting your password from Facebook today, but you don’t remember asking to reset your password, there’s a reason. It’s a scam. And it’s a particularly tricky scam, because it plays on your fear that someone else is scamming you by trying to guess your password. But the reality is that whomever sent you your version of the scam is the one trying to scam you. The versions we’ve seen claim to come from either Chasity Stahr, letnesa@facebook.com, or Mara Krafft jwaterhouse@facebook.com.

There is a series of SMS text message spams going around right now, from TM-GODSGIFT, that has people wondering. The messages from TM GodsGift say that you have won money – usually in the Coca Cola lottery or the Exxon Mobile draw. It’s all spam – it’s all a scam. You can ignore it – or you can report it. But whatever you do, don’t respond to a message from TM GodsGift.

The newest phishing scam is a fake order confirmation from Apple, exhorting you “To view the most up-to-date status and make changes to your Apple Online Store order, visit online your Order Status.” The “visit online your order status” link actually goes to https://www.theinternetpatrol.com/brick-wall/. And while it says that it’s from up-to-date @store.apple.com, it’s not really (our version came from dj @accountingsevices.co.nz)

This is very interesting – an advance fee fraud scam aimed specifically at lawyers. In this twist on the classic Nigerian 419 advanced free scam, instead of the scammer being the “widow of a deposed dictator”, the supposed damsel in distress is a woman whose “divorce was finalized here in Japan”, and she “wants to retain your professional service.”

There is a new Western Union money transfer scam spam making the rounds. It thanks you for “using Western Union Money Transfer”, and gives you a fake confirmation receipt transaction number (“control number”) – in our case the Mone Transfer Control number used was 1629752260. The spam includes an attachment that is an HTML file named something like “WU account.html” – don’t open it!