Recently, I launched a new dedicated spamtrap system with the intention of tracking how spammers acquire and distribute email addresses. It's been a bit of a slow starter, but it's starting to show results. Here's a quick summary of the first six weeks of one of my traps. This can be taken as a kind of model for what an ordinary Internet user might see if they were unwise enough to put their address on a web page.
The spamtrap was triggered at the end of March by a crawler pretending to be IE6 running on the host reverse-mtl-60-145.existservers.com. For a couple of days, nothing happened. Then, on Day 3, the first spam arrived: celebrity porn spam redirected through majtreya.info, loading images from make10.com.
The next day, a second copy of the message arrived, this time referencing two Hong Kong domains. On Day 5, the spammer switched to pharmacy spam: apparently the Canadian Healthcare & Mall spammer is now in possession of our trap address. The pharmacy spam continues to trickle in and then on Day 13, flirtwithmedirect.com has a message for me from Anastasya ('Stazy' to her friends), who has read my profile and found a lot of common between us
. For some reason, she thinks I'm called Klaus, but she's right about us having something in common — neither of us actually exist.
For all her Goody-two-shoes ways — according to her profile she's a non-smoking non-drinking Christian — Stazy is a bit of a tease. She's simultaneously trying to start something with one of my other spamtraps, with whom she also feels that she has found a lot of common
. Tart.
Of course, while serious Stazy is trying to persuade me to settle down and have children with her, my bad angel is tempting me with more Hot pictures of Paris Hilton nude
. What to do, what to do? Happily, the Viagra spam is still coming, so if I ever do get together with Anastasya — or Paris — there's no reason for me to worry about performance anxiety.
Stazy lets another eight days go by before trying again, this time directing me to her picture on loveandonly.com. She's now calling herself Ana, and she has stopped referring to me as Klaus. Maybe she was embarrassed by her earlier mistake. Incidentally, one of the spamtraps she's writing to (she's still hitting the two in parallel) contains a female name, so apparently Ana/Stazy swings both ways. Maybe she's not as strait-laced as she claims to be.
Now the action hots up a little bit more, because Julia K (who thinks she's writing to Niklas) also wants some of my tender, tender love. A few days later, Olga T. is after me as well (although both the girls are also writing to my companion spamtrap and the 'sales' role account, so I wonder if it's really me they're interested in). The names they're writing to are multiplying too — these insatiable Eastern Europeans are reaching out not just to Niklas and Klaus but to Uwe and Alexander as well. I just wonder if I can buy enough Viagra to keep up.
On Day 28, I get my first piece of stock spam, advertising Stonebridge Resources. Interestingly, this is one of the new-style stock spams, loading an image from image-hosting site imageshack.us.
Canadian Healthcare & Mall is still going strong, using a variety of different spam styles that range from image spams (wrapped in reams of hashbuster text) to more complex spams designed to look like a newsletter. The rate of spam is pretty constant: I'm seeing about one message a day to each spamtrap.
On Day 41, I think I've struck mainsleaze with spam that appears to advertise
No! Because when I click on any of the links in the message, I end up at ... another Canadian Healthcare & Mall site. It's the same old pharmacy spam, but this time it's sleazing into my mailbox by wrapping itself in the complete skin of an apparently legitimate newsletter. There's nothing to suggest pharmacy spam in the message at all: it's only when I click links with titles like Inventors Tell All
, or Asia Trail Adventures
that I find myself looking at that splash page with the Cialis ad and the picture of the smiling blonde doctor in her white coat. And you know what?
She looks a bit like Anastasya ...
Summary
| Type | Messages |
|---|---|
| Pharmacy | 29 |
| Dating | 5 |
| Porn | 3 |
| Stocks | 1 |
| Total | 38 |