"Ukranian Girls" Scam Always Getting Through Spam Filter No Matter How Many Times I Report Emails

[Persuader5356]

Hello, as stated in the title I am getting absolutely bombarded by emails telling me to go to a website to "meet hot Ukrainian girls" in what is obviously a phishing email, equipped with ridiculous font and all, no matter how many times I mark the emails as junk, send them to junk, or report them as spam, new emails containing virtually the same text will spam my email address daily. I do not know what else to do and haven't really seen spam emails get this aggressively ignored by the spam filters before, is "Ukraine" and/or "Ukranian" on some kind of email keyword Whitelist? Is it something else? because I have tried just about everything else on my end to no avail. Thank you for your help in advance, I have attached screenshots of some of the emails in question.

[#2]

Hi @Persuader5356,

To improve the situation, here are some suggestions:

1. Adjust Spam Filter Settings: Check your email provider's spam filter settings to ensure they are appropriately configured. You may need to adjust the sensitivity level or update any custom filtering rules.
   
   

2. Use Email Filters and Rules: Set up custom email filters or rules within your email client to automatically redirect or delete emails containing specific keywords or from suspicious senders.
   
   

   

3. Reporting to Email Provider

4. Strengthen Email Security: use MFA

5. Avoid Responding or Clicking Links: Never respond to spam emails or click on any links within them, as it can confirm your email address and potentially expose you to further spam.
   
   Please click Mark as Best Response & Like if my post helped you to solve your issue. This will help others to find the correct solution easily. It also closes the item. If the post was useful in other ways, please consider giving it Like.
   
   Kindest regards
   
   Leon Pavesic

[#3]

Uninstall and reinstall stopped it for me.

[#4]

@LeonPavesic

I'm having the same issue. The problem with the email filters is there are a very large number of permutations of the "Ukraine/Ukrainian" words they are using. It's not just a font change, they are using different characters to spell out the word. If you were to paste the word in a text editor as plain text, it would show exactly as in the subject. This means there are hundreds of different combinations that can be used to get around any custom filters.

Here are just 2 examples in plain text:

𝑈𝒌𝓻𝒂𝒊𝓷𝓲𝓪𝑛

𝑈𝒌𝑟𝘢𝘪𝑛𝒊𝑎𝘯

[#5]

@Hashim305 thanks leon. Uninstall and reinstall worked for a while but now they're back, but not nearly as many. Twenty + years with Hotmail, I guess it's time to move to Gmail.

All the best

[#6]

@tom_hogan1hotmailcom All these spam emails are coming from outlook.com email addresses as well.

[#7]

I am having the same issue. I don't know if this is helpful or not as I just tried implementing it, but the emojis used in the subject or body text have much fewer permutations than the weird fonts. I think if you block any e-mails with emojis that they use that you don't normally get (like the kissing emoji), that should be effective. I will see if I can remember to update this if it is not successful.

[#8]

Nothing has helped. They keep using different combinations of characters/letters from different languages, so it's difficult to block in a rules-based way. Most of these messages have no subject, and there's no way to create a rule to block when the subject is empty in hotmail. Then of course the junk mail filter is useless because they rotate domains. Someone needs to look at this more closely at Microsoft.

[#9]

Exact same issue here, happening since early 2023. Have not found a way to stop it since I have been blocking based on the link they send: “beautylady.uk” or something of that sorts, but it seems like they rotate the link every week to something new so my filter works for 2-3 emails before one with a new link gets through. Plus, everything except the link is written with Unicode characters so they’re able to get around any filters based on subject or body with various permutations of Unicode characters that look the same. So it’s impossible to write a filter to block based on text alone. Unless the source of the emails is stopped, the neural network running the junk detection emails learns to block these, or outlook decides to add a filter for “80% or more of the email is non-ASCII characters”, I unfortunately don’t see a way to stop these annoying phishing emails.

It’s sad that we’ve essentially allowed the internet to reach a state where we’ve given up on trying to stop junk and phishing communication.

[#10]

@Persuader5356  

Protect yourself from online scams and attacks - Microsoft Support 

There is a link in this article where you can report scams.

 "Also, speak up! Report the attempted scam at https://microsoft.com/reportascam and don't be afraid to

warn friends and family so they can be on the lookout for the scammers as well."

Use the Report Message add-in - Microsoft Support

[#11]

It looks like as of around early October of 2023, the automatic junk filter finally started catching these junk emails. I see a few in there with new links (Gorgeous-2023.bid) that weren't in my custom filters that got automatically sent there. Good for Microsoft for training their new spam filters I guess.