I’m not sure if this one is lame (the subject, text, and double salutation are certainly lame) or clever. This spam arrived in the form of a meeting invitation. My Outlook spam filter (SpamBayes) doesn’t seem to look at meeting invitations, and it also slipped past the SpamAssassin filter on my mail server. Consequently I [...]
Filed in Scam,Spam No Responses yet
Here’s a selection of messages from spammers who don’t even seem to be trying — no graphics, no attempt to make the links look legit, plain text. Are these spammers just lazy or do these things actually work? Bottom line: think before you click. Hover your mouse over URLs and see where they lead. And [...]
Filed in Malware,Scam,Spam,Viruses No Responses yet
I got 14 of these over the past 2 days. I’d hope that anyone who gets emails from Verizon would see immediately that these are fake. While they used the Verizon logo and colors, the logo is blurry, the font is wrong, the From: addresses aren’t at Verizon domains, and the English is tortured (opening [...]
Filed in Scam,Spam No Responses yet
Even more people want to send me money. Here are a few examples: Sender: Authorize.Net (emailreceipts@authorize.net) Subject: Successful Credit Card Settlement Report Text: Dear Customer, The following is your Credit Card settlement report for Tuesday, August 14, 2012. Transaction Volume Statistics for Settlement Batch dated 14-Aug-2012 Batch ID: 320541579 Business Day: 14-Aug-2012 Net Batch Total: [...]
Filed in Fraud,Scam,Spam No Responses yet
Supposed friends have been sending me lots of electronic greeting cards lately — a dozen in the past few days. Of course, the person mentioned in the cards is a stranger. The From address has been ecards@123greetings.com The subjects have been: Your friend sent you an e-card. New e-card for you. An E-card from your [...]
Filed in Malware,Scam,Spam 2 Comments so far
The following is a compilation of online discussions of faux donors trying to scam colleges, schools, and nonprofits. In most cases it’s not clear what the scammers are trying to achieve. Maybe they’re just practical jokes. These tales were provided by Barbara Esteve at Cedar Crest College, Roylene Gallas at the Little City Foundation, Don [...]
Filed in Advancement Services,Fraud,Fundraising,Prospect Research,Scam No Responses yet
These are similar to the Linkedin scam I wrote about a year ago. At a casual glance they look like real LinkedIn invitations, but a moment of scrutiny shows they aren’t real. Genuine LinkedIn invitations include a photo, the sender’s company, a link to view their profile, and the number of shared connections. Also, the [...]
Filed in Scam,Spam 4 Comments so far
I got a ton of these earlier this week. First clue it’s spam: when you get 10 versions of the same message. I particularly like the randomized “buyer emails” like lorem.eget.mollis@tinciduntDonecvitae.ca. The text was variations on this theme: Transaction ID 934493892393 Transaction Time : 7/23/2012 03:00 PDT Your funds are now available Dear robert@rlweiner.com, The [...]
Filed in Scam,Spam No Responses yet
Most of these 419 scam emails aren’t worth glancing at, but the language in this one was too good to pass up. Including links to real news stories is a nice touch. I liked the lines: one has to be very careful because a lot of scammers are out there to scam innocent citizens and [...]
Filed in Scam,Spam No Responses yet
The recent theft of passwords from LinkedIn prompted me to post these spams masquerading as messages from that firm. The first one made no attempt beyond the Sender name to look like it came from LinkedIn. The others made a minimal attempt to look like a LinkedIn message and all look like they came from [...]
Filed in Phishing,Scam,Spam No Responses yet
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