millersmiles.co.uk was originally founded in February of 2003 by Mat Bright. His intention was to use the site to sell and promote his love of Book Collecting, but when becoming involved in using eBay, he found that buying and selling online had many dangers. The biggest of these was the threat from spoof email and phishing scams, and users of eBay seemed to be the main targets.

Since the site's redevelopment we have decided not to update the book guide any longer, but we keep the book guide pages on our server as they still attract a number of visitors.

Appalled at the lack of insight for internet users about this kind of identity theft and fraud, Mat set about posting snapshots of the emails and bogus web pages on the site with the intention of building awareness. What followed was a surprise…

Mat began receiving copies of other spoof eBay emails from fellow internet users who came across his site. He decided to expand and develop the site into an awareness building tool and a weapon against the perpetrators of these crimes. Having a security professional background he was up to the task, and set about logging reports of the spoof emails he received daily.

In late 2003, Tam Digital took over the running of millersmiles.co.uk with a view to developing the spoof email and phishing scam section of the site. This they did, and the site and its archive of reports continued to grow rapidly.

Then in early 2004 the site changed hands again, and Oxford Information Services Ltd stepped into the fold. We continue to run the site to this day, maintaining an ever expanding archive of scam reports dating back over two years.

In 2005 we relaunched MillerSmiles together with free sim cards and then again in 2009 automating the scam publishing process.

In February 2004, millersmiles.co.uk launched the world's first scam alert service using an RSS news feed. RSS is a growing technology with rapidly increasing numbers of users. You can now include RSS news feeds in your Yahoo page for instance, and all of the major sites on the web now have a news feed of some sort, (including Yahoo, CNet , CNN and the BBC).

The scam alert news feed can also be used by webmasters within their own web pages and many sites have taken the opportunity to help millersmiles.co.uk build awareness and bring the growing problem of identity theft using spoof emails and bogus web content to the forefront of surfers' experience.

millersmiles.co.uk continues to stand out as the prime international source of information about spoof emails and phishing scams, with a vast library of real examples including details and images of the emails themselves and related bogus web content.

What you can expect from us…

millersmiles.co.uk has one simple goal; to be the prime source of information about spoof email and phishing scams and to offer daily reports of new scams that are in circulation. The daily reports are to be offered both through the millersmiles.co.uk site and on other key site pages around the world.

How you can help…

If you receive any kind of spoof email, please send it to us here, even if we have already published it – we need to track changes and advances in this growing area of crime.

Help us to build awareness – if everyone knew of these scams, there would be a lot less of them to worry about since they would net far fewer victims. You can do your part by including the scam alert news feed in your own web site.

Best of all ….. just tell someone, spread the word and help teach others how to stay clear of these horrible scams. Education really is the best way to keep the numbers of victims to a minimum.

Who we are…

Personal names are kept private for obvious reasons. The work that we do in building awareness about spoof email and phishing scams attracts much attention from what we call ‘undesirables' and as such a small amount of anonymity exists to protect our staff.

In short though, we utilise the part time services of a small number of individuals, dedicated to helping other internet users and keeping the number of victims of phishing scams to a minimum. Every now and then we receive an accolade of some sort (the Feedster.org News Feed of the Day for our Scam Alert Service RSS Feed being one) and we receive the odd compliment from our site users. Each time we receive one of these tokens of appreciation our spirits lift and the daily trudge through hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of pages of data prove to be well worth it. Success to us is helping someone out, and a compliment from a site user is worth its weight in gold.

Warmest wishes from us all at MillerSmiles.co.uk