February 2007 Archives

When you think of spam, what are the 'products' you immediately think of? Pharmaceuticals — particularly Viagra — are an obvious category. Porn is another, and so are get-rich-quick schemes, 'penis enlargement' scams and 'big' cons like Nigerian 419 schemes. If you're a spam connoisseur, you might add fake diplomas, 'mortgage leads', so-called 'OEM' software and stock spam. Between them, these probably make up the bulk of the spam you receive. But there are other 'businesses' that seem to go together with spam like the proverbial horse and carriage and now make up a small but growing part of your daily spam intake.

The name's Francis, Hollace William Francis. And if you think you're being scammed Agent Francis of the Anti-Scam Department Team of the British Secret Intelligence Service (britishsecretservice-uk.org) wants to hear from you by fax or secured email. And Agent Francis is just waiting to use his advanced scam combat techniques (and, no doubt, his moving eagle eyes and realistic gripping hands) on your behalf.

A popular trick among money transfer scammers is to create a fake website that's supposed to be the site of the imaginary company that will hire you to 'process payments' (translation: give away your life savings to the scammer). Some of these are exact clones of a real site, but in other cases a scammer will take a few photographs from one site, add some text from another and construct a sort of superficially-plausible mashup.