Fun with Spammers

Jan 18, 2005

Every day I receive email offers from people claiming to be widows of Nigerian leaders or Afghani Christians (!?!), highly-placed personnel in various banks, etc., inviting me to take my share of the spoils from someone's misplaced millions. The scenarios are so implausible that it's an insult for anyone to assume that I would be stupid enough to fall for them. Occasionally I have been irritated enough to reply. One writer claimed to work for the African Development Bank. "Please direct me to a page on the African Development Bank's website which lists you as an employee," I asked. No reply.

This week's scammer wrote claiming to be an employee of the "Alliance Trust Bank in London,UK" (check it out on Google, no such bank exists) and offered me a share of some millions of pounds which had been forgotten after the death of the owner "on 26 September 1997 in a plane crash in Garuda,Indonesia" - Garuda is the name of Indonesia's national airline, not a place, though they did in fact have a crash on that date, near the city of Medan, Sumatra.

The letter goes on to invite me to pose as this dead man's next of kin, so that myself and the scammer can split the proceeds.

The email raises a number of points of doubt in any skeptical mind. If the man is employed by an English bank, why does he write such poor English? When I asked this question, he testily replied: "I believe you are not in position or capability rather to judge my english grammatical or typographical errors." As someone who writes for a living, uh, yes I am, actually.

And why does he write from a Polish domain, gazeta.pl? In his second email he informed me that I "should not entertain any atom of fear" in participating in this highly dubious transaction (assuming it actually existed). Yeah, right.

One of the scummier styles of scam going around are those attempting to profit on tsunami donations. I got one today from someone claiming to represent the Santa Maria International Response Fund. Although it uses a graphic probably stolen from the Red Cross site, this Santa Maria itself has no site, if it exists at all, and the email merely supplies bank codes to which I am supposed to transfer money. I don't think so.

Scam Spam

Feb 2, 2004

You’ve probably received (more than once) the classic Nigerian scam email: give us access to your bank account and we’ll give you millions in illicitly-obtained funds. You didn’t fall for that one, right?

Well, the scammers are getting trickier. A friend recently received email purporting to be a receipt for a purchase of child pornography. Needless to say, had he been up to anything like that, he wouldn’t have been sharing that info with us. A website URL and phone number were included, so the point of the scam may have been to get him to visit the site and/or call the number, in a panic, to clear up the “misunderstanding”. Who knows what they then would have tried to sell him or blackmail him for.

Similarly, my husband has been receiving emails saying: “We have scanned your computer and found illegally-downloaded files on it; this information has been forwarded to the FBI.” There was an attachment, most likely a virus. I guess in this case the hope was that you would, in a panic, click on the attachment to see if it contained further information or a sample of what you were supposed to have downloaded, and infect yourself with a virus.

I have recently received two emails claiming to be receipts for $399 for a site purchased, part of what appears to be a multi-level marketing (aka “pyramid”) scheme. There was even a credit card number in the usual partially-anonymized xxxxxxxxxnnnn format, where only the last four digits of your credit card are shown, but those four digits didn’t match any of my credit cards. Also, both messages were addressed to sarah@[mydomain].com, who doesn’t exist (since I own the domain, all mail that comes to it arrives in my mailbox). My guess is that these emails are designed to get me onto the site and then try to involve me in their scheme. At the very least, if I responded in any way, they would have proof of a live email address which they could then resell to other spammers.

There are more dangerous email scams going around; I have found some articles which illustrate and explain:

http://www.imakenews.com/emailresults/e_article000097314.cfm

http://www.millersmiles.co.uk/identitytheft/011104-citibank-email-scam.php

The gist of these and many other articles is that, when 70% of the world’s email is spam, we should all be very very skeptical of anything that arrives in our mailboxes. Especially if it asks for personal or financial information. It is very unlikely that your bank would send you email asking you for such information; if you receive such a request, you should call the bank (at a number obtained from some other source than the email) and check.

In the wake of this week’s new virus (yes, I got it, too), I would also recommend:

• Keep Windows and Internet Explorer up to date. Windows is full of security leaks which hackers find and rapidly exploit; the more out-of-date your copy of Windows, the more vulnerable you are. Windows’ built-in Update feature handles this nicely.
• Install anti-virus software and KEEP IT UP TO DATE. Some software automatically checks for updates only once a week or so. When you start seeing reports about a new virus, or receiving suspicious emails, update immediately – don’t wait for the software to do it for you – and then run a scan.
• Use both Ad-Aware and Spybot to eliminate tracking software and other nastiness that you may pick up when visiting websites (even completely innocent-looking ones).

Feb 9, 2004

Advice from an expert friend on avoiding email-borne viruses and other nasties:

"If possible, use any mail client EXCEPT Outlook or Outlook Express. For several reasons, including inherent vulnerability, they are the favorite targets of the virus builders. If you must use them, turn off virus-enabling features such as automatically opening attachments and previewing e-mail." - Mike Richter

Myself, I switched years ago to Eudora, which doesn't have these problems, and is available (including a free version) here.