Spam/Scam Me Sunday

[willowisp]

My Oswego email account has been deathly still since the former owner was informed that her mail was not getting to her. The one exception was a campus-wide announcement about some moronic coward(s) spray-painting swastikas on a dorm. Today it's been relatively hopping, though, with two scams hitting my inbox.

The first began with "This is to notify the entire people (sic) of the University that we would (sic) be upgrading our server for improved service delivery in the next few days", and instructing me to send my username and password "in order to keep your account still active after the upgrade". It's pretty sloppy; they didn't even bother trying to forge the From line.

The other was probably a money laundering scam. It purported itself to be from monster.com, though the reply-to was a gmail address. The salient points were that it would be work from home, 10 hours/week, with a base salary of 1600/month and commissions of up to 6k/month. All I need to do is have an existing bank account and be willing to process payments with it.

Appropriate abuse reports have been filed, etc. I don't even want to think of how many people fell for the bloody things, though. Stupid scammers.

Comments

[echoweaver.livejournal.com]

Yes, new university students make for such a target-rich environment for scams. Once you know what they look like, it's hard to think anyone would fall for them. But when you haven't seen much, you don't know to be skeptical. I hope nobody lost their shirt.

[studentbane.livejournal.com]

Yeah, when I was in elementary school they had a series of safety lessons -- things like "don't get in a car with a stranger" or "don't talk to people you don't know who call on the phone". I guess now they'll have to teach lessons on identifying and discarding spams, scams, phishes, and so on. :-P

[studentbane.livejournal.com]

Wow. You only got two spam? Lucky you. Even with gmail filters, a few still slip through every day.

My favorite, recently, was a meta-phish. It purported to be from a Nigerian ministry of paying reparations to people who had been scammed by Nigerian scammers.

[blink]

Wow. Talk about multi-layered horribleness...

[willowisp.livejournal.com]

I'm sure the number will go up as the school year approaches, or at least those which gmail doesn't nab. Actually, since I'll stop forwarding the mail once I'm physically on campus, I'm guessing it will go up by a lot. Then I won't be able to so lovingly pick apart each one with high detail and such, although reading headers will become less of a nightmare.