Hi lisar
The Private Messages I have received have not contained any links to click on (or at least none that I could see, and I can't go back and have a closer look as I have now deleted all four messages).
So, in effect what the "person" has been doing has been inviting the recipient to contact them by email. Once they have your email address, it is relatively easy for a determined scammer to find out much more about you.
Yesterday on another platform somebody was trying to see if they good get some mail that they had received to the intended recipients.
So for sake of argument it was a George and Jane Smith-McWallop. Never going to be easy to find out much about a Smith but McWallop is an uncommon surname (if anyone has such a name!) so very likely that you can find out all sorts about them.
This item of post had been sent to an address with postcode XN15 etc. XN is obviously made up - I am not putting the start of my postcode up on social media (I have also changed ALL the names of the people involved).
Within five minutes, I had established that George Smith and Jane McWallop were on the electoral register in XN11. To get the second half of the postcode I would have to take out a subscription and probably pay for that, but XN11 is a starting point and not that far from XN15.
Also I had a clue as to the second half of the postcode which would narrow down where these people were recently living to just two buildings.
AND who a Jane McWallop works for.
Nothing to tell me whether George and Jane had got married and double-barrelled their surnames as appears to have been the case based on a photo of the letter that was in the wrong place.
Now a typical scammer isn't going to be Googling people and instead is playing numbers games. Send lots of messages by phone, email, text, or in this case Private Message on the IOSH Forums and see how recipients many bite.
I've had three scam calls on the landline today. ALL bank security, all supposed unexpected transactions, in each case with one being supposedly for Amazon. I've checked the Who Called Me website, and each time I was the first person looking up the mobile number. So, new burner phones, old scam technique.
Suppose 200 auotmatically operated burner phones can convey 100,000 precorded messages a day. The scammers only need 1,000 people not to simply ignore the call and press either button 1 or button 2 to make the scammer's business model work. OK only a few of the 1,000 will go through with the process to the stage where they start giving away personal information and even fewer will give away their card details but it doesn't take more than a few to become lucrative INCLUDING via selling on the victim's details to others.
Kate's had three messages and I have had four, so that suggests that a computerised scammer has sifted through activity on the Forum - it doesn't notice that it is sending the same person more than one message. A huge RED FLAG for me. If I had just received ONE Private Message, I just might have responded, though usually I would have investigated the Forum profile of the "person" first and that would in this case have been enough to put me off.
As long as you don't reply using any personal information - email, phone number etc - to any messages from this "person" you should be fine.
If you were to get a LINK then different rules come into play.