Baby hijack
29 August 2008 - 07:12 AM |
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In a tactic that slightly resembles the so-called hitman spam, where a scammer claims to have been paid to murder the recipient, spammers are sending out messages that pretend they have kidnapped the recipient's child:
Hey We have hijacked your baby but you must pay once to us $50 000. The details we will send later... We has attached photo of your fume.
The text of the message suggests that English is not the sender's first language (in places, the message reads more like Lolcat). Unlike the hitman scam, where the goal was to trick the recipient into sending money to 'pay off' the imaginary assassin, the goal here is to get the user to open the attached file — which, of course, contains a virus, rather than the promised picture.
The real question is, what the hell is a ‘fume’? My best guess is that the spammer is using a dictionary to translate from their own language, and that a word for 'child' in their language is actually a homonym, with two possible translations.
Update: the hitman spammer is back too, with more scam messages being reported recently.
Spammer FAIL #1
16 August 2008 - 08:27 AM |
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Today's crop of spam includes an apparent advertisement for a language school in Buenos Aires. A few extracts will give the flavor.
J.B.Wilkinson & Son established in 1776 Stratford-on-Avon as Masters on grammar schools ... Fellow sons and daughters and non native english children where accepted and taught the school's private programs bases on Formal English Language ... Since 1901 expanded to Adults Teaching and Performance ... J.B.Wilkinson & Son is now in Argentina openning suscriptions to teach the English Language with teaching technics elaborated by our Masters to make Spoken English fluent, fast and easy to accomplish.
I'm actually having difficulty believing that this was really sent by ‘ye old masters on teaching’
, J.B.Wilkinson & Son Ltd, and isn't either a complicated joke or an attempt by a rival to sabotage their business. They even screwed up the message itself, with a recipient address welded onto the end of the 'From' line, and random HTML tags in the 'Subject'.
Politik spams
07 August 2008 - 08:25 PM |
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A few news sites and blogs have been discussing the news that John McCain's website encourages supporters to submit their endorsement of McCain in the form of comments on a selected list of political sites. The site offers some daily suggested ‘talking points’
that supporters can use, and in return for diligent comment-spamming, the most prolific posters stand to earn various McCain-themed rewards.
Continue reading 'Politik spams'