Possible Phishing/Spam Email

I had two private messages as well. Hope an admin gets this before someone follows up on something malicious .

Cheers

I  see the forum has a "notify a moderator" but the private message inbox does not, and needs that protection.  Here is phishing spam inbox message I want to report.

Got this message from Laura Ralph right now , too.
This is not very convincing from Norton that now at 16:14 CET this stuff is still being delivered. I have blocked this address and of course, I didn't answer.

I also got this notification of a private message from the same community user (Laura Ralph). I'm located in the UK.

Is this a spam email pretending to be from Norton Community, or is it genuinely sent through the community forum ? If the latter, then this is very disappointing that a security service provider has allowed this to happen. NOT GOOD ENOUGH !

Norton/Symantec need to disable this asap, investigate what threats this might pose to users' devices and issue a statement and any necessary mitigating actions for users that were targeted by this personal message.

Have a look a this thread https://community.norton.com/en/forums/possible-phishingspam-email, and see how many other users received that PM. You may want to post there as well?

SoulAsylum - I appreciate the points you made but there are some tell-tale signs that something is going on with this rogue user account. Firstly, a quick check on the profile reveals the account was created less than 24 hrs before the personal messages were sent, and there is no history of the user contributing to or creating any posts. The PM was not linked to any forum threads, so one has to wonder if that is 'normal'. There must also be some way of monitoring how many people were sent a PM from this user in a short space of time time, so if this number was greater than might normally be expected, putting all this together should have sounded some alarm bells. Perhaps there are some lessons to be learned regarding analysis of suspicious behaviour so as to block such activity until a moderator can perform some additional checks. It would be similar to your bank spotting suspicious activity on your account or credit card and is surely not beyond the capabilities of Symantec.

I know hindsight is a great thing, but there is also something called pre-emptive actions.

Me, too!  I opened the following thread in the forum Norton Internet Security, and asked that Norton have a "notify a moderator" in the inbox like in the forum to report this phishing scam problem.

https://community.norton.com/en/forums/violation-private-message

Is anyone else getting spam private messages? How do we report them to the site's admins?

If the problem is this widespread then someone from Norton needs to deal with this ASAP.  I see LauraRalph's account at https://community.norton.com/en/users/lauraralph is still active and they're logged in right now spreading more mischief.

Have any of the Gurus following this thread posted in the private board they share with the Forum Mods or sent an @mention to a Norton employee just in case they're monitoring their e-mail this weekend?

EDIT:

I spoke too soon.  LauraRalph was just banned from the forum and their account is now inactive.

See  Phishing/Spam Email here.

Initial action to ban sender ahs been taken

It isn't "spam" in private email that I get, I get the one from a pretend-a-be cop needing my information - that, for the newbie Norton techs, is what professionals referred to as 'phishing' - unless Norton has changed phish to spam this week.  Doesn't say much for Norton's keen interest in protecting it's customers - even in a private Norton Forum email.

Norton should consider being pro-active, not post-reactive.

All: The user account was disabled and they are banned.

Cheers

All: The user account was disabled and they are banned. I created a post in the Guru area and it never saved. Just went to the forums home page and was never created. I now see it in the open forums, of course not where it belongs and cannot open it since I get "access denied". So several hours ago the attempt was made to notify an admin on my part.

Cheers

So what measures have been put in place to stop Laura Ralph and her like setting up a new account and sending more malicious PM's ?

Has this person been reported to Google as well, given that he or she is using a Gmail account too?

Thanks

Peterweb,

If you have any input with the developers might I suggest that you suggest to them making it easier to report future miscreants to the admins. I still haven't found a way to do that other than by a forum post like this or a private message (but then I still haven't hound a place where they are listed so I can message them, I found an old message from Tony W so I had his address and sent him a message, but I don't know if he read it yet).

Hi folks, 

Thanks for reporting this on time. We are investigating on how this mass spamming happened via PM. 

We've banned the LauraRalph account. 

We will also look into the above mentioned suggestions. Thanks

Sorry for the inconvenience caused.

Yes, the green "autosave" is really always on and you cannot see what you type  - horrible.  It flashes every second.

@ imacri Same email address? Like I said before, someone from Norton should alert Google about this abuse.

dfkettle:

@ imacri Same email address? Like I said before, someone from Norton should alert Google about this abuse.

Hi dfkettle:

Yes, same e-mail address, identical in content to what MyName13 showed <here> but with the subject line "Hi dear".  I believe the first two PMs I received (now deleted) were much longer messages.

If you google "Sgt Laura Ralph" you'll see various scams dating back years being reported for this "persona" with @gmail, @yahoo, @blaze.uu.ru, etc. e-mail addresses.

The e-mail address used in the private messages (PMs) isn't really the issue, though.  The problem is that Norton is allowing this person to register multiple user accounts in this forum (LauraRalph, now Ralph2) and immediately send out masses of private messages to other users before they've made a single post in the public forum.

G-mail is notorious for scammer and hacks. Personally I have had the gmail domain in its entirety completely banned on my gaming forums since day one. Never have an issue with spammers getting in and doing this. Just a thought out to those who can make the changes. I ALSO know there are legit gmail accounts out there however, Google, should be notified as others has brought to light. Although time intensive for the Admins all new accounts should be screened before approval. Other thoughts are this person obviously has to have a Norton account of some sort to be able to create an account here and log in. Worth investigation and shutting that down as well.

Cheers