Tag: spam

Spamnesty Sharon

Spamnesty at https://spa.mnesty.com/ is a website for creating automated responses to scam and spam messages.

Below is a summary of one such thread of messages generated by spamnesty and the scammer’s replies.

The original scam message is a typical 419 scam – the sender offers the contents of a bank account belonging to someone known to the recipient and there is an odd story about why the recipient is the only who can get the money before the bank shuts down the account. That message is in German.

Spamnesty replies with a computer generated random response

‘Hello,
I talked to my colleagues about this but they seemed to have some apprehensions; namely, they’re worried that the offer isn’t fleshed out enough. Would you be able to go into more detail about exactly how this would be structured?’

As that reply is in English, the scammer switches to English as well.

‘aloha

what is your age?

Where do U now?

I need to consummate talks

I am alone chief 31 y.o. Lady born in Russia’

A strange response by the scammer who seems to have moved onto a romance scam instead of the 419 scam.

Scamnesty replies

‘Hello,
We need more details from you. My colleagues are worried that the offer isn’t fleshed out enough. Could you explain more about exactly how this would be structured?’

Next the scammer switches back to pages of details about the supposed fortune left in a bank account and offers to split the fortune 50:50.

Scamnesty sends a reply

‘Hi, Great, thanks. Could we have a short call to discuss the specifics? What are your contact details? Also, what is your pricing model like?’

The scammer seems to be confused again and sends another strange romance message with excerpts in French this time

‘Bonzur My:-) Let’s smooth small talk!
could we speak?
Where do You stay now?’

Another reply from Scamnesty and the scammer changes to German, then Russian and then Ukrainian and changes tack to offering website design services.

All very confusing, but it was Scamnesty that wasted the scammers time and the scammer got nothing from the exchanges.

Well done Spamnesty

If you have any experiences with these scams do let me know, by email.

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The Extent of Spam Messages

Around 45% of all emails are spam i.e. they are messages you do not want, have not signed up to receive and would stop if you could. But spammers send out billions of such unwanted messages every day in the hope of getting your attention and probably also wanting to make money out of you.

Spam is very wasteful – it clogs up your inbox, takes up your time and is almost entirely pointless.

Messages you don’t want to receive very little attention and nobody wants to buy from a business that has annoyed them.

Spam messages are most commonly some form of advertising (36%), finance (26%), social media notifications, reminders you don’t need, hoaxes, fake warnings, people trying to get attention and so on.

This does not include scams which is where the sender is intent on defrauding the recipients in some way.

There are millions of people and businesses sending out spam messages but around 80% of world-wide spam comes from about 100 scam groups that treat the sending of such messages on behalf of their clients as a viable business.

The cost of such time-wasting to business is estimated to be somewhere between ten and twenty billion dollars world-wide per year. This includes the cost of anti-spam services, employee time identifying spam messages and technical staff.

More spam emails originate in China than anywhere else, but vast amounts also originate in America and Europe.

Most spam is harmless but increasingly it is used to carry malware and that can be dangerous as thieves seek to copy your identity or infect your computer.

Q. Why is spam called spam?

Spam is a cheap tinned meat product that has been around since the 1930s. Some claim that the name Spam meaning unwanted emails comes from a 1970 Monty Python’s Flying Circus sketch in which a group of customers in a Spam-themed restaurant sing about Spam and everything on the menu is full of spam.

If you have any experiences with these scams do let me know, by email.

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Spam Email Statistics 2019

Around 30 billion emails are sent each day and about half of those are spam in some form.

That spam is made up as follows:

 

Does Spam Work?

A proportion of the spam messages are just lazy advertising by genuine companies but vast amounts of it is scam messages of various kinds.

How effective the scam messages are in getting a response depends very much on exactly what it is. But typically, scam messages receive 1 reply in more than a million messages.

That seems extremely ineffective, but if the scammer sends enough millions of messages then they will get sufficient replies to enable them to steal from people.

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Chinese Spam Messages

You may receive emails in Chinese with a random sprinkling of long numbers, long number and letter combinations and occasional English words such as Instagram or Twitter.

Has the world switched to Chinese for international communication?

No.

These are typically spam messages, but often are selling the sort of services that spammers and scammers buy.

If interested, you can translate the messages easily online using Google translate or similar free service.

The messages contain offers such as “multi email content, multi email subject, random intelligent combination, staggered rotation of corporate email exchanges”.

This is offering services whereby the purchaser (scammer or spammer) provides a basic email message in a series of segments and the service ‘intelligently’ mixes up the segments per email message it sends out, uses a number of exchanges to send the messages, makes them look as if sent one at a time, changes the email title randomly and so on.  This is all designed to ensure the scammers or spammers messages get through to the unlucky recipients without being caught in spam filters by the recipients Internet provider or the recipients email service.

This is legal though clearly objectionable.

If you receive such email messages in Chinese – just delete them as they are spam.

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