Hoax emails - what do you do about them?

[XAusted]

dh received one of those emails the other day that ask for all your bank details so that they can send you loads of money or something. Although gullible, thankfully dh ignored it. Are you supposed to forward this sort of email to the police or anything?

The police aren't interested - I know this from experience! They said just delete it, and don't ever give your details out to unsolicited sources.

Also, don't ever reply to them, even to say sod off, as it lets them know they've written to a current/in use email address.

Thanks! Not surprised police not interested - would be a full-time job to deal with them all. Will just delete it.

I got the same one. I reported it to Yahoo which was the email host, address thingy, whatsit. I don't suppose they'll do very much, but they might boot the person who's doing it off.

Otherwise there's very little you can do. But like www said don't reply.

anais - if you are going to complain about these it's worth checking the reply-to address rather than the "from" as they aren't always the same and the from is more often than not faked. To complain you can look up the address to send complaints to at abuse.net - or if the domain you want isn't listed try abuse@..... or postmaster@.... For yahoo it's [email protected] or [email protected]

Most reputable organisations will kill the mail a/c pretty rapidly, even if they do no more than that.

Forgot to add, the information about this fraud, and what to do about it is here . You can forward it to [email protected] if you want to report it although the chances are it will be one they've already seen.