Possible new Audiogon phishing scam


I just checked my email and found four emails from Audiogon. Each email was supposedly from Audiogon saying a post of mine was removed. The post of mine that was removed was displayed in the email. Each email was of a different post that was supposedly removed by the moderator.


Example of one of the emails.

I removed the posted message from the copy and paste info below. All posts were from older posts of last year.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Hi jea48

Your Post was removed by a moderator

2015-02-23 18:47:04 UTC



Content may be removed for one or more of these reasons:

· It looked like spam

· It was abusive towards another member

· It depicts explicit and/or violent content

· It contains profanity

Please make sure your submissions comply with our guidelines. https://forum.audiogon.com/pages/guidelines

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

I did not click on the audiogon link at the bottom of the emails.

None of the posts in the four emails fell under any of the four reasons given for the posts being removed by the moderator.


Here are the actual Agon guidelines


https://forum.audiogon.com/pages/guidelines

jea48
Hey, me too! Two posts were supposedly deleted. What was strange was they weren't trolls. Ha ha

Just did a search on the deleted post of mine and they deleted the entire thread. I remember it now. It involved a member bashing a company who was very out of line since the company had offered him a choice of solutions. The member took up the companies offer and continued to bash them.

Better late than never. Good work A’gon

Al - that was the post
Got my first one last night regarding a post from almost a year ago. I don't remember the post at all. But it could just be A'gon finally cleaning up some of the treads. In the past they have been very generous regarding posts that are downright mean and loaded with profanity. In the past they have just deleted the entire thread not just an offending post.
Could be, jea48-

let us hope this is a ploy by some 12 y/o kid in china or so...

I hope that will this newest iteration, Audiogon, is not doing away w/ past threads!!!
emb said:
I got 4 thanks again now i can sleep tonight!!

Fine for you, but what about the poor guy whose job is to read through 10s of thousands, maybe 100s of thousands, of threads looking for those that may not meet Agons guidelines? Talk about eye strain. How do you think that poor guy is sleeping at night?

Seriously though, I wonder if it is actually a carbon based unit that is reading past threads looking for Agon guideline violations or a robot?


Never acknowledge nor click any link(s)...
Good advice, of course. What I do when a questionable link is involved is to simply hover the mouse pointer over it. All of the email programs I am familiar with will then show a "pop-up" indicating where the link actually goes.

In doing so, what should be looked at carefully is what comes before the first single slash (as opposed to the double slash which follows "http:" or "https:" if present). The gobbledygook which often follows the first single slash doesn’t matter in determining the legitimacy of a link.

As I alluded to in my previous post, I also look at the originating IP address that can be seen in the message properties, and check out what location or country it corresponds to via a service such as maxmind.com or whatismyipaddress.com.

Regards,
-- Al


I received one of these massages last week from (2012)?
Never acknowledge nor click any link(s)...

Keep me posted & Happy Listening!
Hi Al,
Thanks for the explanation.
I received the same thing yesterday,and it sure had me scratching my head!
Yogiboy
Post removed 
Hi Jim,

I received two similar emails yesterday, quite possibly relating to the same thread as some or all of the emails you received (the thread being from February 2015, and involving power cord wiring). The posts that were cited in the emails I received were certainly not objectionable in any way.

My guess is that the emails were automatically issued as a consequence of what I determined to be the fact that the entire thread had been deleted.

In any event, the emails do not appear to be phishing attempts, as the links they contain do in fact go to Audiogon. Also, the originating IP address that can be seen in the message "properties" does not appear to be suspicious.

Best regards,
-- Al