It’s my third iteration on the same basic principle: take a carefully filtered and enhanced archive of 150,000 email messages and then sort, categorize and analyze them, then put them in a defanged, indexable/searchable list format so that people can browse them.

The first was a program I wrote in perl back in 2004, it was a POP sucker that connected to the mailbox, attempted to extract message parts and rewrite them as a html page. While successful, I was never happy at my efforts to disentangle nested messages and alternate body parts – this meant that a lot of emails showed up with lots of Base64 and other garbage. (eg. ScamDB_S_74.php)

The next try I had was to use a mail archive indexer program called ‘Hypermail‘. This was mostly successful at splitting messages into component parts but was still not quite flexible enough for my needs and the indexes were way too long. (eg. HYPMAIL/date.php)

So this spring, I am trying a whole new system that I rewrote in PHP, my code of choice for the decade. I am still mailbox based, mainly so that I can prune spam that has sneaked through my filters, but that may change soon.

This is how the Scamdex Engine works:

1. Scam Emails arrive in the honeypot mailbox.
2. Using Thunderbird with various Add-ons, I partially manually sort the scam emails into a holding mailstore and throw away the junk.
3. A program runs nightly which:
   1. Analyses emails in the holding mailstore into one of 5 categories (419/AFF, Auctions, Jobs, Phishing, Lottery).
   2. Adds some extra Headers to the email.
   3. Moves it to the correct mailbox archive location.
   4. Runs MHONARC to create the indexed archive and html-ized emails.
   5. post-processes the MHonarc-ized pages to add a php index include file, update the (MySQL) database and  distribute the keywords  and scoring to  META and the nice little  graph widget.
   6. 
   7. err… that’s it!
      

It’s not pretty or fast but it works, and I can understand it. It’s easy to fix and add to. It’s annoying having to run the process every night from scratch but until I work out how to use the MHONARC system to add/delete emails from the archive, it’s all I can do. Any suggestions about how I can do this better, let me hear them!

(send to scamblog(a)o7e.net)

LifeLock, a provider of identity theft prevention services, has developed the nation’s first and only PROACTIVE identity theft solution designed to help PREVENT crimes before they occur. They back the service with a hefty $1 million guarantee.

The services they provide break down as:

1. They BLOCK your credit so only you can use it – They put alerts on your credit reports with all major credit bureaus. So, if anyone tries to do anything with your credit report, get new credit, change your address, expand credit lines, open a checking account, get insurance or utilities, and more, you will be called directly for approval first.
2. They back up their services a $1 million guarantee – If your identity is ever stolen, they will fix the problem and reimburse you up to $1,000,000 in financial losses.
3. Stop pre-approved credit offers, thus saving a few trees and helping to curb one of the most popular ID theft systems, getting a credit card from a trashed credit card offer – They say that they also reduce the amount of other junk mail to your home.
4. Ensure that things go smoothly when you apply for credit – they don’t give much detail on this point, but they also provide ‘free’ annual credit reports.
5. They even monitor your children’s identities.

LifeLock retails for $10 per month or $110 annually but you can get a 10% discount..$9/month or $99/annually if you signup from the Scamdex Site.

Scamdex approves of this product, especially in the case of elderly relatives, young adults and others at risk due to confusion or inexperience, both of which are the scammer’s stock in trade. If you’re worried about Granny wiring all her assets to a Nigerian Widow then I’d definitely take a look!

I give my cellphone number out to very few people. Friends, relatives, Scamdex-related business and the occasional on-line order, if they insist. So when I get a call, it’s normally someone I know personally or business. So I was surprised to get a call from an outfit called ‘Auction Profits LLC’ (http://www.auctionprofitsllc.com) , asking me if I want to make money with drop-shipping on eBay.

After listening to their inept spiel which seems to involve mentioning eBay and MONEY as often as possible, I asked them where they got my phone number and name. The claim was that I had placed an order with another company called ‘Online Supplier’ (http://www.onlinesupplier.com) . They knew my name, address and phone number and indicated that they had additional credit card information as well.

When I persisted, I was zapped to the supervisor who blustered about how I must have bought something from them before and, anyway, how about making some money on eBay?

He completely missed the point that I made that I run a website devoted to exposing scams (such as his) and he dropped my call. I got a weird ‘private’ call a few minutes later (2 minutes of static followed by a ’sorry wrong number’) which I strongly suspect was them.

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