I don't know if the TV Licencensing server has been hacked or if a phishing email writer made a lucky guess, but today I received an obvious phishing email suggesting my license could not be renewed and that it expired on the 31st August.
In fact it was due to expire on the 31st, but I renewed it on the 28th.
Other than that stroke of genius guess with the date of expiry, it was badly spelled and seemed to be offering me the facility to renew for free.
Are you sure it wasn't a genuine one sent by some illiterate clerk?
Careful examination of the headers will probably show if it originated from inside the .gov hierarchy. Snag with their "go-paperless" scheme is that I don't really trust computer records not to get corrupted.
I have had one or two howlers from council and government responses where the words were all spelt correctly but some of them were the result of a spell checker correcting bad typos to the wrong words. They very obviously don't proof read the replies that they sign and send out.
I was watching the BBC parliament coverage on subtitles last night and the best realtime c*ck-up was a phrase containing "is John Bercow" which was presented in the sub titles as "Schoenberg cow".
Are you over 75? - in which case you should get it for free (for now).
I have recently had an email coming from a survey company acting for a bank I deal with that had *ALL* the characteristics of a spear phishing scam (except that it was genuine). I declined to participate in their survey to help them "understand" my needs better.
Very well reported scam.
A human monitoring the feed corrects any serious clangers within ~5s.
Almost all of them are guesses, the ones that happen to arrive with serendipitous timing (e.g. within a few days of your licence expiring, or when you happen to expecting a parcel, etc) grab your attention and catch out the unwary ...
I dunno, I thought Johnson mentioning the "tea shack" was pretty good.
Although, idiot that he is, he might actually have meant it.
Martin Brown presented the following explanation :
Yes, absolutely, because I had already had confirmation by email that it it had gone through fine and the paper copy arrived this morning.
My mail system shows where it is actually from on the top line, the originating email address - so I check that first.
As have I, but this was one of those standard messages which would have been checked and rechecked had it been valid.
A while to go yet, by which time it will be gone :-(
It happens that Jim GM4DHJ ... formulated :
It happens often in the text subtitles, they are done on the fly by a machine, rather like SIRI and etc...
Andy Burns explained on 04/09/2019 :
It caught me out for 5 seconds lol
I couldn't renew mine at all using their link.
Because I have kaspersky safe banking, when the time comes to call up 'verified by visa' something just times out.
I had to make the tvlicensing.co.uk URL a 'safe site' so that kaspersky safe banking powers up before I enter any details.
Kaspersky security has a point. "Verified by Visa" is a textbook example of how *NOT* to implement a properly secure customer verification :(
I did wonder if the real one might not be .gov.uk and the one you went to was a Google search suqatter (much like the USA visa waiver con).
It seems to be the tvlicensing bit that times out though.
No, I have now had a reply from snipped-for-privacy@tvlicensing.co.uk
Yes I've managed to banish this one and the one from the car licensing crew and the dwp, all of which seem to have had some kind of unspell checker run over them!
Brian
Yes many companies who act on behalf of others even get the idea as to why their emails might be spam. Indeed many charities emails end up in the online spam bin at Virgin merely due to them sharing a machine of a different charity which does not match their name. I mean, who would expect, outside of the sight loss sector to find emails from london vision to occasionally come through a machine identified as pocklington trust. The reason is they are both in the same building and tend to use each others resources, Hot desking and all that. Brian
Having had a mobile phone since Christmas I do have a laugh sometimes at dictated texts both from myself and others. Brian
I remember dear old Terry Wogan going along with the Irish Government working out of a tea shop. Brian
You can't tell where the timeout really happens. Most likely it is Kaspersky blocking the would be pop-up window from 3D-(in)secure.
USA visa waiver con-men also send out very convincing looking payment acknowledgements but just pocket your cash - it is only when you actually try to board a plane that you find out you have been conned.
OTOH in this case the governments own TV licensing link also opens the same site URL that you referred to. So it should really have been on Kaspersky's white list of commonly used trusted payment sites.
Unlikely that they would let clerks write individual emails to license holders in such a simple situation like that. Much more likely to send the license holder a canned email in that situation and automatically too.
TV licensing emailed today saying they are aware that some card payments are not completing but showing as pending on customers accounts, so it isn't just me :-(
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