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I reported two phishing scams to Outlook by clicking on the drop down "report phishing scam" in the Outlook mail app. Where does the phish e-mail go and is it reported to the genuine company, in this case a bank? Also, why can't a suspicious e-mail be forwarded to a reporting agency without opening it and exposing my computer and possibly my contact list to the bad guys?
***Post moved by the moderator to the appropriate forum category.***
Managing personal Outlook.com account settings, security, and privacy
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
Hi,
To block a specific sender, you can find the instructions by clicking this link. This should help in getting your query solved.
Regards.
BB
You might be right about being ignored, but apathy is the greatest enemy of action and blocking is often ineffective.
If no one bothers to report anything, then you can be absolutely certain that MicroSoft will do nothing flat since they will reasonably assume that there is no problem.
In fact it is a HUGE problem and I would encourage everyone to report every single incident and put MS under the greatest possible pressure until they damn well DO something about it.
My own suspicion is that so many posts are reported as phishing scams that there is no disposition of them. They are just ignored. Might as well just block sender, but don't bother to "report" phishing scams.
i rarely see junk in my inbox... but really i am sick of these scams in my junk.... they are brute obvious as scams and sickening to find several times a day...i need to keep my junk clear of this trash in order to find legitimate emails gone into the junk by mistake...i am heart sick of the viagra scam and dating ones... etc..trying to bring me to ruin about 15 times a day..i too thought i was reaching someone by pressing that magical phishing scam button...but disappointed..still getting same old tricksters..if we put key words in our filters why can't these people's emails just be deleted without ever seeing them? i mean nobody else would mention such things as viagra or dating to me in their headers..this is really sickening..and has a bad affect on me every day!
I receive at least 10 phishing emails per day of people claiming that I have urgent emails from Facebook, Google and Paypal. As you well know, these companies do not send emails this way, and the addresses of origin don't even have anything to do with employees of those companies. Do you write code to block combinations of words regarding these sites when email addresses don't match? Seems quite easy, yet I continue to receive them.
On the other side of the coin, I would ask the other users who have reported phishing emails and complained here about the lack of consequences: what do you think will happen to them? The answer is nothing. The Microsoft police don't show up at anyone's house to give them a "banned for life from the internet" sentence. It is so easy, and free, to have hundreds of email addresses linked to fictitious names that it is truly impossible to trace. The only way to trace a fraud is after the money is lost, and can then be traced. But even then, if your money was stolen by a Chinese government sponsored hacker or pimply teenager in Bulgaria, what are you going to do? Again, nothing. Local governments have authority, and until they start stealing HUGE amounts of money, they fly under the radar. The best way to combat this is at the source, by improving the blocking technology and updating the "common word" archive to ensure that fewer emails get through. The fact that they all (or nearly all) appear in the junk email box is evidence of this effort.