Spam still thriving

Here’s a scary statistic.

According to a recent survey by Marshal, almost 30% of internet users have purchased the following from spam, which manages to find its way into their inboxes:

• pornographic material
• fake watches and designer goods
• cheap drugs and prescription medicines
• pirated software

That’s a staggering one in three users who support these criminals by buying their garbage.

Worldsoft easy money scam

Here’s a pretty obtuse way to fish for legitimate email addresses. Pretend you’re a real company, send out a “job offer”, guaranteeing $6000/month for part-time work and see how many knuckleheads take the bait:

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Bank of America phishing scam

Got this phishing scam from some knuckleheads in the USA who must have been hoping that (1) I’m a Bank of America customer and (2) that I’m even dumber than they are:

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Spam harvester tracking

Stumbled on this today, while investigating dodgy user agent strings:

“Project Honey Pot is the first and only distributed system for identifying spammers and the spambots they use to scrape addresses from your website. Using the Project Honey Pot system you can install addresses that are custom-tagged to the time and IP address of a visitor to your site. If one of these addresses begins receiving email we not only can tell that the messages are spam, but also the exact moment when the address was harvested and the IP address that gathered it.”

A distributed service which tracks and prosecutes spammers who scrape email addresses from websites?

Looks very promising and definitely worth looking into.

Trust the Midas touch?

I received this “mainsleaze” spam a few days ago from Midas. Now this is supposed to be a reputable, mainstream company but stupid actions such as this are likely to damage their reputation for quite a while:

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