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Message Control
“We know how to help unemployed” – Fraud
Tuesday, October 12th, 2010Tags: college, diploma, fraud
Posted in Email Fraud, Message Control | Comments Off
LinkedIn Alert – You Need ED Meds
Tuesday, September 28th, 2010Today’s featured email is spam disguised as phishing.
Usually email that pretends to be from a high profile site is half of a phishing attempt. The other half is a fake login site that actually collects the information.
This email uses the pretense that you have an alert from LinkedIn to lure you to an online aphrodisiac dispensary. more »
Tags: phishing, spam, spoofing
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How To Take Advantage of the Economic Stimulus Plan
Tuesday, September 14th, 2010The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 has been controversial since before its passage in February of 2009. Everyone seems to have an opinion on whether or not it’s a good idea; if it’s enough or not; or how it should be implemented.
Regardless of the relative merits of the idea, there are many ways of cashing in on the stimulus package and not all of them involve the government.
Tags: IRS, malware, scam, semi-legitimate marketing, virus
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Free Walmart Gift Card – Shady Marketing
Wednesday, September 8th, 2010If you want to receive more spam than you could possibly imagine then you should definitely participate in this offer. As far as we can tell it’s technically legal but that doesn’t make it any less of a scam. This is the old, tried and true, “give us a bunch of information we might give you a prize” sweepstakes offer. If you substitute “money” for “information” this is the same ploy that’s been used by carnival pitch men since, well, as long as there have been carnivals.
Tags: fraud, funny, scam, semi-legitimate marketing
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UN Sends Letter as Image File – Phishing Example
Tuesday, August 31st, 2010People attach all kinds of files to their email: pictures of new babies, kids, dogs, cars and whatever; pdfs of contracts, estimates, requests for quotes and other business correspondence; spreadsheets, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, blueprints, advertising layouts and various other files. What they don’t do is write letters and then send them as image files.
Tags: fraud, spoofing
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Update Your Account Information – AOL Phishing Example
Thursday, August 19th, 2010This piece of spam is interesting, if only because of its rarity. These days we see very little email from the aol.com domain and a lot of that is spam. The formerly ubiquitous Internet gateway has all but disappeared.
AOL may have fallen on hard times lately but that’s not stopping some enterprising phisher from trying to compromise AOL accounts. If you are one of the few remaining AOL users you’ll want to watch out for this scam . . .
Tags: fraud, phishing, spoofing
Posted in Message Control | 1 Comment »
How To Stop Unwanted Emails From Reaching Your Inbox
Thursday, July 29th, 2010
There are really only two ways to keep spam out of your in-box:
- Prevention — This is at best only partially effective and requires a fresh and un-spammed email address. However, if you do start with a new address prevention can seem downright miraculous.
- Filtering — Also not perfect but a good spam filtering service should remove more then 99% of the messages you don’t want. The thing to watch out for in filtering is false positives. (False positives are messages that should have been delivered but were blocked instead.) Blocking spam is easy, the hard part is not blocking the good messages.
Tags: anti-virus, spam
Posted in All About Email, Message Control | Comments Off
Vonage Account Security Phish – A Perfect 10
Tuesday, July 27th, 2010This is one for the record books.
The other day we intercepted several copies of a phishing email that, in conjunction with a fake web page, attempts to acquire your Vonage phone number and password.
Subject: Important – Vonage Account Security Information
From: “donotreply@vonage.com” <donotreply@vonage.com>
The body contains this image file:
Tags: forging, phishing, url, vonage
Posted in Message Control, Phishing Lessons | 1 Comment »
Arthur Simmons – InTrust Domains – Bogus Domain Marketing
Monday, July 26th, 2010Domains are cheap and easy to register, and marketing of otherwise low value domains can be so profitable that spammers simply cannot resist the opportunity.
Our favorite example currently goes by the name of “Arthur Simmons” from “InTrust Domains” but the personal and business aliases this spammer users are no doubt very many indeed.
Posted in Message Control, Spam Tactics | 25 Comments »
Gulf Coast Relief Scavengers
Thursday, July 22nd, 2010Here we go again. The vultures are circling, ready to take advantage of people affected by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill; just like they do after every disaster.
We just blocked a stack of emails purporting to offer help collecting money from the 20 billion dollar compensation fund BP is so graciously providing. In reality though, these emails are an advance-fee fraud attempt.
Tags: fraud, rotten spam, scam
Posted in Email Fraud, Message Control, Spam Tactics | Comments Off
