Fake Grand Piano Scam - Courier Service Payment for Non Existent Piano

I run a local magazine and from time to time we get letters from locals who are offering items to other people for free so an email offering a piano wasn't entirely out of the ordinary. However this one is a courier payment scam and on reflection there were a number of red flags that we could have picked up.

The email we received was from andreafreeman90@hotmail.com but this could come from other addresses too.

Don't pay any money for something without seeing it.

Hi,

Thanks for your response, the Yamaha Baby Grand Piano GC1 model used to be owned and played by my husband who passed away last year, the dimension is "151cm by 146cm". It was last tuned sometime last year before he passed. She's about 2 years old and in impeccable condition.

I'm moving my properties to another place and I don't think my husband will be happy if I sell this piano, at the same time, I am settling for a home with less space, so I'm hoping to give it out to someone who is a passionate lover of the instrument. I wasn't going to leave it alone in an empty house.

The Piano is currently in storage with the movers I employed to move my properties from my house. The movers can deliver anywhere. However, the beneficiary has to pay moving costs. In the attachment are the pictures of the Piano, I look forward to your reply if you are interested, if not I can contact someone else.

Regards,

Andrea Freeman

Oracle Apex Email Stops Sending via Gmail SMTP Relay Jan 2026

We send a lot of emails from our various Apex applications and as of late January 2026 these emails have stopped sending. There is no error message shown, the Apex mail queue just builds up with messages waiting to send. There are various posts online about Gmail implementing additional security but no definite answers as to why Apex has suddenly failed to send out the Oracle email queue.

There is a post on an Oracle forum from another user that has the same issue and an Oracle Apex developer has posted that it has been identified as a bug and needs to be patched. This is apparently a level 3 bug so might take a while to resolve but unfortunately isn't listed on the Oracle support website so we still don't know what the bug is.

https://forums.oracle.com/ords/apexds/post/apex-mail-gmail-custom-smtp-host-and-ehlo-2004

The Oracle Bug ID is 38950783

In the meantime we've switched to using Mailgun for our Oracle Apex emails which is working fine. We already had an account with Mailgun as we use it for our website so it was an easy transition.