One of the perpetual mysteries of spam is that we still get 419 spam. Surely by now everyone who has a pulse, let alone an email account, has heard about this kind of scam? And yet, day after day, the 419 spams keep rolling in because people, unaccountably, keep falling for them. A Californian man lost $750,000 to a prize-pitch scam last year; more recently, a British man lost £130,000 to scammers in a two-phase scam, where the second phase involved scammers pretending to be secret agents who claimed to be able to help him recover his stolen money.
January 2009 Archives
Google AppEngine abuse
20 January 2009 - 07:37 AM | PermalinkLike death and taxes, one of life's little certainties is that if you offer anything for free on the Internet, spammers will find a way to abuse it. Free webmail accounts become spammer dropboxes, free web pages end up hosting Viagra ads and phishing sites, and blog services end up hosting more splogs than real blogs.
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2009
12 January 2009 - 09:40 AM | PermalinkThings have been slightly up and down at spamnation.info over the first few days of the New Year, due to some technical glitches, including some associated with a move to a new server. Things should be mostly straightened out now.
Regular visitors to the site may also have noticed that the blog has been a bit quiet (read: totally dead) lately. I'll try to do better in the New Year. I also hope to roll out some improvements to the site, probably beginning with better statistics. Analytics suggest that many visitors come to the site looking for spam statistics, but the existing information on the stats page is fairly disappointing and not very informative.
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