More Spam than Scam, but still….
We’ve been selling cars and motorbikes recently on CraigsList and have noticed a pattern – someone replies to the ad expressing interest and asking all the right kind of questions, but always include ‘Do you have a VIN report on the {vehicle}?’. A fair enough question, but when you reply in the negative, they quickly →
Scamdex Data used in Research – if only they’d asked!
So a routine search turned up a little Research Paper from the University of Nebraska in Omaha. Trends in Phishing Attacks: Suggestions for Future Research (2011) | Ryan M. Schuetzler | University of Nebraska at Omaha, rschuetzler@unomaha.edu While I’m flattered by being used as a creditable source, I am upset that they: Used the Scamdex Email →
An Alternative to Annoying Ads (Is there one?)
I often have brilliant ideas (for websites) while trying to get back to sleep in the early hours of the morning. If I can still remember them I do a little research, only to discover that the idea has been done, and often done to death and there is now a website listing all the →
Scam Of The Week: FTC Refund Phishing Phraud
Scam Of The Week: FTC Refund Phishing Phraud Warn your employees, friends and family Hi, There is a new Scam Of The Week where bad guys are trying to trick people into clicking on phishing links to receive an FTC refund, with the twist that the refund is actually real. The FTC first took action →
Voice Message Notification Email Warning Could Be Ransomware
Voice Message Notification Email Warning Could Be Ransomware Don’t play voice mail messages from suspicious sources. Xavier Mertens at the SANS Internet Storm Center: “Bad guys need to constantly find new ways to lure their victims. If billing notifications were very common for a while, not all people in a company are working with such →
Is it Polish? No – it’s a Czech Scam!
I would say that 99% of all the scams I see are in English. A smattering of French, Russian and German, even occasionally Italian and Spanish. I have no way of identifying character-based languages (Japanese, Chinese) but I try. This is a new one for me – I first assumed it was Polish, but Google →
100 Days of Scams – Dying Woman’s Charitable Bequest
A heart-rending plea from a dying woman for you to take her life savings and distribute them (keeping 30% for yourself). Uses a valid news source to provide veracity. The scam is a simple enough Advance Fee Fraud (aka AFF or 419 scam). Before you see a cent of the $20 mission, you will have →
100 Days of Scams – Mystery Consignment Box
So, you’ve been contacted by a senior officer at JFK about an abandoned diplomatic consignment box, containing (approx) $12.5 M, which for some unknown reason has your name on it. Unlikely as that seems, they want to send the box on to you, but there’s a couple of trifling details – a ‘clearance’ fee of →
100 Days of Scams – From The White House
#100daysofscams So the White House denied all knowledge of this email – Thanks Obama! ———————————– The white house →
100 Days, 100 Scams received by Email
99.5% of the email scams we receive are in the English language. There may be a few in Chinese/Japanese that don’t get identified by us, but it’s not so easy to spot them. This one appears to be Turkish, and is presumably about getting some of AYMAN AL ZAWAHIRI’s money: Bey, bana izin ver cunku →
Data Conversion Job Scam is active again
The scam goes like this: a company contacts you about a job where you work from home, doing →
Ten Years of Scamdex!
Yes, Scamdex started ten years ago, in 2004! When I started, it was a very simple site, hand-written in Perl and was purely a database of email scams. Now it includes Scam Tip Off Reports and many more emails. I would like to thank my visitors, who mostly arrive via a search engine (mainly Google) →
Spurious Awards Scam
The “Spurious Award Scam” is a vanity-targetted scam, similar to the “Who’s Who” scam where you are to →
Five Reasons Why Nigeria is the Scamsters’ Safe Haven
You’d think that by now, everybody would know better than to fall for any of the infamous “Nigerian scams,†such as the 419 scams. (The “419†designation comes from the section of the Nigerian Criminal Code that addresses fraud.) Yet Nigerian scams are alive and well. The 419 scams come in several variations, with a →
“Nigerian Scam” is still working – Police Reports show.
I occasionally think to myself; Surely everyone’s heard of the Nigerian Scam (aka Advance Fee Fraud or 419 Scam, after the relevant section of the Nigerian Criminal Code). But, alas, people still continue to fall for these simple scams. The deal is often identical, only the names and places have changed . These places are →