I just recieved one of those “someone stole your credit card/card number” spams this evening, i knew it was a fake right away, after all, since when does Visa use a Netcom/Earthlink ISP?, stupid, stupid spammer, you don’t want to cross me…
so, after i got a good laugh out of the e-mail, i forwarded a copy to Earthlink’s abuse department, AND the Visa credit card company :evil:, hopefully both companies will come down on the spammer like a ton of bricks (or something equally heavy and unpleasant)
in case anyone doesn’t know, here’s how to determine a fraudulent e-mail…
look at the Return path and second recieved line, the spammer appears to be using a Yahoo e-mail address and is sending it from the Mindspring (Earthlink) servers, somehow i don’t think the monolithic Visa corporation is using a Yahoo account thru Netcom…
What REALLY irritates me about spam (and partly because I’m a stickler for such things due to my education and chosen occupation) is the poor technical quality - the misspellings and typos. What’s sadder is that people seem to either ignore it or believe it to be right (or, worse yet, believe that everyone, even corporate workers whose words reflect directly on the company, are as poor writers as they).
I got spam on my fucking cell phone recently. It was a text message about “I buy homes in the Memphis area” or something, with a hotmail e-mail address. This guy had also been using a message board where I’m an admin to attempt to lure clients to his site until we banned him.
So I went and opened up a Yahoo account, and I wrote a letter to the hotmail address, telling him that he’d done this to me three times (true) and to many of my friends as well (also true) and that if he did it again, here’s what I’d do (extremely fucking true):
I’d send him a polite e-mail and say “Your ideas intrigue me; how can I subscribe to your newsletter?” or something. Then I’d meet him and talk business for a while. I’d get his business card, presumably with a phone, address, and e-mail on it.
Then I’d give that information out to every fucking advertiser I could find. I’d post the e-mail (in a hidden spot) on the very, very busy Web site that employs me, so the spam robots would find it. I’d call every church and charity I could find and leave a message with his name and “I’m interested, please call me.” I’d call up every direct marketing outfit I could find and give them his address. I’d do everything I could to ensure that his phone would ring incessantly, his inbox would blow a fuse, and his postal carrier would need a goddam pack-horse to bring him his mail.
It was a lot of work to get rid of one spammer, but (a) it was for me a symbolic fuck-you to all spammers, and (b) damn, that was cathartic.
We’ve been getting a lot of spam lately claiming to be from a bank (occassionally it is your own bank). The general gist of the message is that there have been security problems and they need you to go to their website (linked) and enter your username and password for internet banking.
You go to the website and it looks identical to the banks own website. All of the links go to the banks real website. The only hint is that the address will be slightly odd (eg www.westpac1.com.au rather than www.westpac.com.au).
The most recent ones have even had a heap of “beware of scams” content in the body!
It is not hard to see how people can be fooled by these.
The most recent one that came this way was very well written and contained such gems as (bolding added by me for emphasis, name of bank removed to protect the innocent):
And, it gets better:
There’s a lot more, it’s quite well done. I just showed it to my wife and other than being slightly confused by getting an email from a bank that we don’t use, she thought it was legitimate and said that she would have followed the instructions and “verified” her account details if she was a customer with this bank.
That was terrific! What’s great is that he (I assume) doesn’t know which of the people he spammed is going to do that, so any person he spams in this manner increases his risk of this reprisal.
[QUOTE=htns]
HOT TEEN LESBIANS WANNA CHOKE ON YOUR COCK!!!
QUOTE]
Your ideas intrigue me; how can I subscribe to your newsletter?
I got one just yesterday claiming to be from MSN billing. It was quite well done, only one grammatical and NO spelling errors. However, since I cancelled my MSN account a couple months ago, I’m only going to be pleased that they’re having trouble processing my credit card! It was a nice try, though.
Exactly. As far as he knows, it came from a Mr. John Doe, and I got unknown_memphian at yahoo as the address. I wonder if he’s stopped yet.
The only way he might be able to find out who it was is if he uses a bunch of different hotmail addresses, so that an e-mail to one of them will indicate what cell phone he texted it to. But that seems unlikely; the guy’s really pretty amateur as far as spammers go.
I figured that’s why they use the “type the word in the box” graphic, so any auto-registration programs would be fooled. I’d imagine they instituted this precisely because of people doing that. I presume that it’s not too much trouble once one sets up the auto-registration program.
The random letters to get past the spam detectors is self defeating. Seeing a message with the letters ‘akjhahdfajkhra’ randomly added into the title frees me from even having to think about whether or not the message is spam. It’s like putting a hole in the bottom of your fishing boat to fish better. Sure the fish get in the boat easier, but then you sink. Similarly, the message gets past the filters easier, but it goes nowhere fast.
Surely there can’t be people out there who actually open messages with random gobblygook in the title?! right? say it aint so, my faith in humanity rests on it!