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Interestingly evil spam
Jun. 26th, 2005 11:01 pmYesterday I received this email message:
( Text of spam )
I think this is quite cleverly put together. It plays upon the not unrealistic fear that someone might have got my card details and used them to attempt to make a purchase on the Spanish Shop, which responsibly declined the transaction and is now informing me about it. My natural curiosity would lead me to click the link to see what it was they ordered. The url is a genuine one, and is a clone of the real Spanish Shop site: it includes an IE trojan of some sort. (So don't click it if you use IE!) Furthermore, the phone number apparently reroutes to a premium rate one, so if I call it they soak me that way.
The tells are careless though. The username and password are just too randomly-generated looking -- I suppose a card fraudster might generate such things randomly, but it just seems implausible. And the number is a mobile one -- if they'd used one of the obscure premium rate codes I mightn't have spotted it. There is no return email address. And finally the grammar is pretty poor -- OK,the people running the Spanish Shop might not be native English speakers, but I bet whoever built their website and wrote their automatic scripts was.
I expect those of you who get lots of spam have seen and ignored dozens of these already, but I picked it out because it seemed slightly novel and clever. I pity the poor Spanish Shop people... hope no-one tries this with one of my businesses. I've been 'joe-jobbed' several times, and that's bad enough.
( Text of spam )
I think this is quite cleverly put together. It plays upon the not unrealistic fear that someone might have got my card details and used them to attempt to make a purchase on the Spanish Shop, which responsibly declined the transaction and is now informing me about it. My natural curiosity would lead me to click the link to see what it was they ordered. The url is a genuine one, and is a clone of the real Spanish Shop site: it includes an IE trojan of some sort. (So don't click it if you use IE!) Furthermore, the phone number apparently reroutes to a premium rate one, so if I call it they soak me that way.
The tells are careless though. The username and password are just too randomly-generated looking -- I suppose a card fraudster might generate such things randomly, but it just seems implausible. And the number is a mobile one -- if they'd used one of the obscure premium rate codes I mightn't have spotted it. There is no return email address. And finally the grammar is pretty poor -- OK,the people running the Spanish Shop might not be native English speakers, but I bet whoever built their website and wrote their automatic scripts was.
I expect those of you who get lots of spam have seen and ignored dozens of these already, but I picked it out because it seemed slightly novel and clever. I pity the poor Spanish Shop people... hope no-one tries this with one of my businesses. I've been 'joe-jobbed' several times, and that's bad enough.
