Beware

This is not new and has nothing to do with either AVSIM or ASV. These phishing attempts are now a cottage industry, and if your email address has ever been posted publicly (I.e., a newsgroup, an unprotected forum, etc.), then I can assure you that your email is on a phisher's email list. It is very simple!! EBAY does not send out "account verification" email, and neither do any of the major banks and financial services that are also phishing targets. AVSIM and our staff get some 12 to 30 of these a day. They simply end up in my "kill" file automatically.

I think it's extremely unfair of the original poster to include AS5 in the header.

Yes, well, that's why I posted my response. Any knowledgable web denizen knows exactly what's going on.

Why so? It was the ONLY way to have purchased this great program, and anyone was free to 'harvest' those users/email addresses that had published the fact that they purchased the program.ASV had NOTHING to do with the Pay Pay PFIshing scam OTHER than that those who have bought it could be lulled into responding BECAUSE they had recently used the Pay-Pal payment service.You might have been one of them....as the saying goes...fore-warned is fore-armed!I would have nothing but thank-you's if someone took the time to give me a head's up where they thought another FORUM USER could be made into a fraud victim!Cheers!Mitch R.

"I would have nothing but thank-you's if someone took the time to give me a head's up where they thought another FORUM USER could be made into a fraud victim!"There's two sides to this. One way scams wreak havoc is by terrorizing the community into a mass mailing of "watch out" posts and emails. Some of it is self serving--some bots grab onto the "please forward this to everyone you know" type emails that still surface from time to time.I honestly feel that if someone doesn't have enough common sense today to know better, a warning won't help them. Phishing has been around a long while now, and all the major web merchants are on record as never soliciting information via email.Also, bots don't know forum users, AV(5) users from Adam. They just harvest keywords and buzzwords from certain sites. I had never used Paypal, and received the phishing emails. They don't know if you use Paypal or not or Avsim. There are likely people out there scratching their heads who received this scam saying "What's AV5? What's Paypal?" -John

I dont think F1 uses paypal. I thought it was all done by them selves using a 128-bit encrypted purchasing module. And next to that, if you recieve an email asking for your CC #, and you give it to them, or even have to question that, a red flag should come up. Never give it out over email.:) Cheers! :-wave

>Why so? It was the ONLY way to have purchased this great>program, and anyone was free to 'harvest' those users/email>addresses that had published the fact that they purchased the>program.>The OP suggested by the manner of his writing that the makers of ASV are the ones sending out the phishing emails, either out of ignorance or to harm those people.That's blatantly untrue, those emails are completely random. I never used paypal at all for example (I don't trust the company or their services) and I get several paypal phishing scams every day (and on average 1-2 dozen phishing scams in total each and every day, all for services I don't use.>ASV had NOTHING to do with the Pay Pay PFIshing scam OTHER>than that those who have bought it could be lulled into>responding BECAUSE they had recently used the Pay-Pal payment>service.>He didn't say that anywhere... If he weren't out to harm ASV (maybe inadvertently) he'd have admitted that product name from his post.>You might have been one of them....as the saying>goes...fore-warned is fore-armed!>Everyone has been warned about these things dozens of times. If they haven't gotten a clue I doubt one more post from a source they don't know is going to change that.Sadly many people never get a clue as tens of thousands of people worldwide still fall for these scams every week.

"viral marketing" for ASV(5)?

Here's a second try.1. ASV Developers are NOT sending out these Pfishing emails.2. If an ASV(5) user finds one of those 'fishing' emails scams in his/her email, they might...just might think that this one is a legit request for information given as they had just used the Paypal service recently3. My post was a head's up for those that frequent AVSIM that the Paypal scam was happening at the moment, and that they (a recent Paypal user (to buy ASV(5) should not fall to this deception because of recent use of the method of payment. Hence is why ASV(5) was even mentioned alongside the Paypal scam email SOMEONE created and hopes to have hits back on.I can't believe how everybody put an "the O.P. must want to damage the vendor" slant in response. Give me a break! I love both AS2004.5 and ASV(5) Even if I didn't I would not make it a life mission to bear misery to others. How immature this would be!In future, I have decided to let everybody handle a possible compromise themselves. I guess that people will learn by being taken rather than possibly reading about something they (being that they just got into the game/internet etc) did NOT KNOW. Not every current user of the Internet can be automatically assumed to be 'savvy'. That would be a very unrealistic approach to other's knowledge base of Internet Savvy. This is my last head's up post anyway, so I guess all the above now becomes redundant. Cheers!Mitch R.

"In future, I have decided to let everybody handle a possible compromise themselves. I guess that people will learn by being taken rather than possibly reading about something they (being that they just got into the game/internet etc) did NOT KNOW. Not every current user of the Internet can be automatically assumed to be 'savvy'. That would be a very unrealistic approach to other's knowledge base of Internet Savvy."People can get "taken" in so many ways. We who know better have a choice--we can fire the alarm whenever the risk is there, or we can take more proactive measures. Firing the alarm isn't going to help protect the gullible--just like there's still people who believe the earth is flat, and that man never landed on the moon, the likely candidate for one of these scams--at this late date--probabaly falls into the same category. The media is saturated with these warnings already and people had better know better--no need to continue to saturate the forums with them unless something reveals personal information about you that couldn't have been gathered any other way other than targeted phishing.Still, you can put your time to good use by forwarding the emails to paypal, especially the source. That can be broadened to cover any provider falsely linked to in these phishing scams. All have security departments, and it's better use of one's time and does have results.-John

Mitch,Yes, to a lot of us this is old hat. I've been receiving those emails for almost a year now. It is good to give a heads up to those that know no better (yet) but the only problem with your post is that you hinted that ASV was responsible in some way. Since the title are the first thing anyone sees, it seems misleading. I changed the subject of this post to better reflect what you may have been trying to say in your original post.Here is a good tip for all you browsers (and, yes, us "seasoned" ones know this)... no bank, financial institution, sales point or reliable vendor will ever ask you to visit a web site to verify your personal information. Delete the emails and do not respond. If they want to get to you bad enough they will send snail mail or call you eventually.Spammers get email addresses from everywhere including these forums if your email is visible in the post. They usually just scan for what would be a valid email address. That's why you will see some type john at paul dot net. It looks like words but is easy for the eye to decipher. I like to make them spam themselves and their host provider like this:Spam bait:root@localhostpostmaster@localhostadmin@localhostabuse@[email protected] don't always fall for it but I like to imagine that some do. :)

Hi All,This was posted in the AS fourum also, and there is no intent by the poster to single out ASV or HiFiSim. It has been responded to, and here it is a "heads up" post. Many of us know that it is an unfortunate aspect of the Internet.Hope this helps,JimActiveSky Sales and Supporthttp://www.hifisim.com/images/asv_dev_team.jpg http://www.hifisim.com/images/asv_proud_supporter.jpg