You have to give spammers some credit for creativity, especially when they can manage to get strangers to pay for free software.
In-boxes are seeing more such spam for exactly this type of pitch:
Subject: Action Required : Download New Acrobat PDF Reader For Your Windows
From: Adobe Systems Incorporated <direct@adobesysterms.com>
Here’s a copy of the bogus email:
Click for Larger Image
While a great many computer users realize that the Adobe Acrobat Reader is a free download, clearly many don’t and can easily fall prey to this scam.
Realizing these emails may be blocked, the spammer in question has registered quite a few domains in an attempt to keep ahead of spam filters, such as (but not limited to):
- http://www.adobe-acrobat-download1.com/
- http://www.adobe-acrobat-download2.com/
- http://www.adobe-acrobat-download3.com/
- http://www.adobe-acrobat-download4.com/
- http://www.adobe-acrobat-download5.com/
- http://www.adobe-acrobat-download6.com/
- http://www.adobe-acrobat-download7.com/
- http://www.adobe-acrobat-download8.com/
The spam landing page will look reasonable official, and is frankly very well designed. An example of the spammer’s sites:
Click for Larger Image
The “purchasing” process attempts to appear legitimate, even offering to “opt out” of marketing communications after the sale.
The site tries to further up-sell you on bougus offers of support and additional software of questionable, if any, value that will create re-occurring charges on your credit card.
Meanwhile, while the site’s used to process these fraudulent offers sound secure, with domains such as “http://secureonlineweb.su” the actual “check-out” process doesn’t even bother to use SSL connections.
The spammer must figure (and probably rightly so) that any user they can con into providing a credit card to a foreign domain (.su is the Top Level Domain for the former Soviet Union) for what is otherwise free software, probably isn’t the type of person who’s going to notice whether or not the web site’s subscription forms are secure or not.
We have no way of knowing how many recipients are duped into providing their credit card numbers to over-sea’s web sites without any security encryption, but it’s an educated guess that those credit card numbers that are collected are probably billed until the customer tries to cancel and then are probably used illegally and/or have the account information sold to other spammers for further abuse by other cyber-criminals from there on out.
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