Just received one of the most blatent and in-your-face banking scam, spam emails I think I’ve ever seen.
The only thing missing is the checkbox at the bottom that states “Yes, I agree to you emptying my account and transferring all my money somewhere else” …
Kevin.
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I had my first ‘spam friend request’ today on Facebook. Isidra – it was a name I didn’t recognise (obviously) so I had a look at her profile. Fascinated, I clicked ‘show similar stories’ and ‘older posts’ on her wall … 5 pages of ‘Isidra and X are now friends’ messages! 5 pages! Oh, and 6 status updates, 3 of which point to a profile on an adult site … and the others along the lines of ‘off to bed’ or ‘having a bath’. That was it. No ‘Isidra commented on …’ or ‘Isidra is using (some currently trendy app like FarmVille)’ or ‘Isidra was tagged in a phot’ or anything.
The profile was created on the 3rd of Feb and she now has 120 ‘friends’. Danah Boyd had a very interesting set of posts on what constitutes a friend on a social network like Facebook (I like the reason that paraphrases as ‘to keep my parents out’!). But it doesn’t really account for the ‘I have no reason, I just blindly accept friend requests from anyone who asks’ reason. I mean, just looking at the profile you can see there is something more than a little odd!
I’ve read about clever ruses based around social engineering, where a spammer might examine someone’s list of friends on two social networks and fine a contact who is on one and not the other, and then create a fake profile for them on the other one. The ‘target’ will accept a friend request on the other social network thinking it is from the friend they already know, but in fact its from the spammer.
In face of the 120 friend requests in 1 week that Isidra managed, I have to wonder why anyone would bother with anything more sophisticated than just asking every profile they come across! I wonder what her hit rate is … how many friend requests she sent out to get those 120.
I haven’t worked out where ‘she’ got my profile from yet, maybe that’s something for another day. Well good luck to Isidra, and I hope her 120 ‘friends’ don’t suddenly find themselves have to patch up a compromised Facebook profile or clean up a virus infected PC … oh, and I would be slightly wary of that link to that profile on the adult site …
Kevin.
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I do pride myself on, generally, knowing what is sensible and what isn’t on the Internet. However, every so often something just catches you out no matter how careful you are.
Well, when I was about to login to write my post just now, I missed on the password and so got the usual ‘try again’ screen, but on that screen was an advert. And it was design exactly like a pop-up window. It asked me to fill in a survey. I didn’t want to (I don’t like surveys), so I clicked the ‘x’ in the top right corner (I never click buttons on these things, they could be programmed to do anything). Except this was a picture, with a link. I ended up at a dating site. So they caught me, because my attention was wandering and now I’m irritated.
This is why we have so many problems with spam, malware and so on still. The weakest link is always the bit between the chair and the keyboard, i.e. us. And people will exploit that endlessly, and always do. The main reason people keep sending out spam is because someone, somewhere, is clicking on the links and showing that a small number of people are still believing spam. It only has to be a very small fraction of a percent, but if sending a million emails is ‘free’ to you, 0.01% is still 100 people.
Making ads look like dialogues and pop ups is an oldee, but it obviously still works, even though its deception. Grrr.
Kevin.
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