I'm only recently getting "You recived an e-greeting!" scams in my email

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’ve gotten the regular scams over email for years and years. Lessee…I need to log into my PayPal or Ebay account, or maybe my bank account needs me to verify all my info. But this is a new one…the “You’ve received a postcard” or “You’ve received an e-greeting!” scam.

When being in the 'net started to explode in the late 90s, my friends and relatives actually sent a lot of those, and I never hesitated to click on them. I don’t know anyone who sends those any more, so I was a bit skeptical two weeks ago when I received one. The first thing I checked was the website I was supposed to click on.

It was all numbers. They didn’t even try to hide the numerical web address. Usually they do that. For example, the bank ones would say “Bank of America” but when I put the arrow over the URL, the true numerical URL shows up.

And now I’ve received a DOZEN of these e-greeting ones in two weeks. I did a Google search, and some of the results show that people have posted about these recently, but many of the posts went back a year or two. I find it odd that I never got one before, then suddenly got so many recently.

I really want to know what the site looks like. (I won’t, I promise.) But I’m curious. Are there tech people here who’ve had to check them out so you can find out how to protect your company or coworkers? Do they try to make it look legit, or once they get someone to click do they figure what the heck and just have it install the trojan horse with nothing more than a blank page?

2

Snopes says those things install a variation of the Storm trojan.

Storm trojan removal instructions from Symantec

3

I’ve been getting them too. Usually it will say the name of the person sending it, like “Ivylass sister has sent you an e-greeting!” but the anonymous sender gave me a clue that it wasn’t legit.

4

I’ve been getting them too all of a sudden–just in the past few weeks. They mostly say that an old classmate has sent me a card.

5

Me too- mine say they are either from “classmate” or “friend”.

6

I’m getting ones from my “neighbor”. Yeah, right.

7

Haven’t seen those, but I’ve been getting a ton of PDF attachments. Opened a couple and they were the expected stock picks and natural male enhancement adverts.

8

Ugh. I’ve been getting the pdf ones a lot and the egreetings one. I clicked on the ecard one at first (my husband and I send them back and forth quite often) but as soon as I clicked it I got scared and closed the browser window because I had that “this ain’t right” feeling. Hope I didn’t do any damage.
Funny thing is, I called our computer guy and said “Hey, I got an ecard that doesn’t look like the ones I usually get. Is this some kind of scam?” and he acted like I was an idiot for asking. Well, that’s putting it a bit harshly, but at least an annoyance to him.

9

I suspiciously opened one of the “e=greeting” spams and found a PC executable file. Fortunately, I have a Mac.

10

The same thing is happening to me. Except the very first one I received, I stupidly followed the link. Except, Firefox warned me that the url looked suspicious and stopped me from going to the website. Since then, I’ve been receiving dozens a day.

11

Yup, same here – pdf attachments and e-greetings scams have recently started showing up for me, as well. It’s interesting, too, because we recently installed a Check Point Safe@home router/firewall on our network, which dropped the volume of junk mail that was getting through from hundreds a day down to single digits per week (it’s an amazing little gadget!), and the only ones that still seem to be getting through are the pdf and e-card ones. I’m informed by my IT guy, though, that we’re still in the “trial” period with Check Point, and that as soon as we go full-boat, those, too, shall stop.

P.S. Hi, Pepper! It’s nice to see you around again! You’re the 2nd Doper who’s been MIA for the past 2 years who I’ve seen come back again in recent days. Cool. :cool:

12

I’ve been getting some from a “Worshipper”.

Maybe they mean “fellow member of my non-existent church”, but I contend that if I have worshippers, they ought to know to pray to me and not email. Yeesh.

13

Because of these, I’ve had a slightly different problem recently. My Beloved and I celebrated our 20th anniversary a couple weeks back. Without my knowledge, she had sent out invitations to all our friends through, you guessed it, e-vite. When she proudly told me what she had done, I quickly called up everyone on the list and gave a verbal invitation to all those that had thrown out the original as spam(about 80%).

14

Exactly the same happened for me. I don’t know why I even clicked on it, I should’ve been much more wary.

15

Another ME TOO, to both the ecards and the PDFs.

I like the way mine moved from ‘neighbour’ and ‘friend’ to ‘secret admirer’. I wonder what is next.

16

Somehow, one of these got sent out to a huge distribution list at my company. I wonder how many of our National Reps clicked on it.

I also got a personal version that came along with it. I opened neither.

17

In my case, it’s “loved one.”

18

I’ve found my secret admirer!!

19

Thanks Shayna. I’ve been lurking daily for the past two years, and I finally had some spare cash to join back up again :slight_smile:

20

Yes, Hey pepperlandgirl ! It HAS been a long time. I see you are back in Utah–as I remember, you had just moved from Utah to CA when you started posting. And you were in high school . . . man, this board has been here a long time.

There has been a real rash of those card spams lately. My husband and I have made them into a running joke: “you’ve recieved a card from a deranged lunatic”, “you’ve revieved a card from your parole officer” . . .