Jump to content
Science Forums

Trends in Spam


Recommended Posts

I have too many email addresses, and as a result, I wade through a lot of spam.

 

As such, I've become an amateur spamthropologist, and I thought I'd open a thread on interesting trends in spam: what they do to get you to look, who they're targeting, etc.

 

To get things going, I've noticed something that sure shows a shift in where the email lists are targeted: If you're even high school age, you probably remember the huge flood of spam a few years ago with the enticement of Britney Spears or Anna Kournikova in undressed states. In just the last month though I've seen a huge uptick in the same enticement but now with a new set of objectified females.....Bollywood Actresses!

 

India has been known as a source of spam, although much less so than Russia and China, but now they've clearly become a target!

 

Most folks call 'em green onions, but they're really scallions! :)

Buffy

Link to comment
Share on other sites

we have a little over 300 email accounts, actively use postini for filtering (it's currently blocking about 5000 emails an hour or so), and still sometimes get spam, so we create postini rules to deal with that spam, but that makes us follow the spam trends too. The end of last year spam was all about selling rolex watches, free trips, enhancement pills, and fake bank notifications, and "congradulations you won one gazillion dollars, just give us the account number to transfer it to" (those were fun)

 

This year there are a few to really look at other then the above:

new thing going around about PayPal accounts, BE CAREFUL!

IRS emails, IRS will NEVER contact you through email!

Anything asking you for account information, (and there are a few bad ones going around)

Lastly, anything that warns you about activity on your credit cards, before you panic and click that link, call it in with your bank, those lines are on 24/7, or go online and check your account, never follow links in emails...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I have one email address that I use for spam. ;)

Almost any site that requires an email address, I give them this one email address. Over the years, it's accrued quite a bit of attention from the spamming community. :)

But thankfully, this keeps my main account virtually spam free. :)

 

Here's a random sampling from the past day in my "spam account" junk mail box:

 

  • Sexy singles
  • Get paid to work with Google~As seen on ABC, CNN, CBS
  • Blacksingles.com - join today
  • Dell Laptop Offer Confirmation # blah blah blah
  • Dish Network ad
  • Debt relief ad
  • ad infinitum...

 

So, the trend I see is that everyone's tight on money and as such, there's a lot of singles out there looking for love. ;)

If anyone wants a free Dell, let me know and I'll forward you the email. :hihi:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

A recent spam fad – which has hit not only my couple of unfiltered sacrificial email boxes, but also my snailmail box – are “get your bailout/economic stimulus $$s here” solicitations. A paper letter I got was very official-looking, with a company name like “United States Treasury Department of Economic Stimulus” and a nicely designed federal-looking seal.

 

I think some large, hungry financial ambush predators are gathering around imaginary US public financial watering holes, looking for unwary prey, and wonder how busy various state and fed lawfolk are because of it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

here's one fresh off the list "Lonely? A hot sexy certain someone wants to spend some quality time together".... oh those sexy singles.....

 

wait, that's from, her, but it couldn't be, but is it really? wait a sec.... that is not spam.... time to run, uuuh, pick up fish food, yeah, at a 24 hour pet food place, yeaaah, that.... :)

 

 

lol, jk

Link to comment
Share on other sites

There are of course lots of major businesses that spam these days, but I've found a lot of them actually will stop spamming you if you ask.

 

One that's been really odd has been Gevalia Coffee. Gevalia is actually owned by Kraft Foods, but it's primary distribution channel is through mail order. They have been sued as a spammer:

In 2005, Kraft was sued by Hypertouch, an ISP, for spamming its Gevalia coffee brand. Kraft was accused of sending multiple waves of junk advertisement to the ISP's customers, the action brought under the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 act. The parties resolved their dispute by mutual agreement and the litigation has been dismissed

 

...but they seem to have decided to go around this by going through "independent distributors," which makes all the spam that gets produced a game of whack-a-mole, because there are so many of them!

 

In spite of the citation stating the suit is settled, they're still a huge spammer and their distributors show up on most black lists.

 

I'm sure you do. Sterling Cooper has more failed artists and intellectuals than the Third Reich, :)

Buffy

Link to comment
Share on other sites

500 spam emails? i cleared my spam folder beginning of last year, and i have 1900 emails in it....

 

Without any justification that I know of, I've recently been getting a lot of bestiality spam.

You been signing up for some mailing lists on your favorite websites...?

 

mynah, It's checking your mail filters, remember that some people would bounce email back saying this word is not appropriate, so then you can write the script to parse those replies and figure out how to spam based on the words you do not yet filter....

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Can anyone explain to me what the point is of sending spam consisting entirely of disjointed words, such as:

avarice boondocks cypselopmorphae daedalus, etc?:)

Random unusual words cause many spam filter algorithms to allow an email to pass, desipite it containing suspicious text like “lowest cost prescription medications”. Spam generating software commonly inserts such nonsense text to defeat spam filters.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 5 months later...

New spam wave: In the last couple of weeks I've gotten a lot of spam with the following characteristics:

  • Always has an attached image--never displayed inline--that has a *CAPTCHA'd* image of a typical spam ad for male enhancement pharmaceuticals. That is, they've taken the images you're used to seeing in these spams and run them through a program that randomly warps them so that each one is different, and therefore passes spam filters that are looking for known spam images.
  • Has subject lines that are often intelligible, but not spam related. Often they have misspelled words, or oddly the first few and last few letters of the line are apparently lopped off. Examples:
    • Ay be defined as an apparatus for doing work by mea
    • Ontentedly snoozing on
    • the enemy now; he will not have time to l

    [*]The names are usually a single name, but often odd, like "Whitehouse" "Haramoto" or one of my favorites: "Farguharson"

    [*]The body looks like its randomly pulled from web pages, and can be anything from WWII history to bibliographies, and like the subject line, usually the begining and end are chopped off: "Dly emptied than the wants of the pheasants warranted. So he kept a watch on the box, and soon discovered a wood-pigeon perch on the box [...] One of them has been named the Ichthyosaurus, which means Fish Reptile. Its head somewhat resembled th"

 

This one's fascinating because it's obviously a program that is automatically generating these so that they have no easily detected signature, but can easily be manufactured on the fly from any infected zombie bot machine.

 

You do have to be silly enough to pop open the image for them to be affective though, and while they must be devilishly hard for spam filters to detect, humans once trained can skip over them without too much trouble, so I wouldn't rate them highly for effectiveness in marketing.

 

Any real record person knows that the number one most powerful marketing tool when it comes to music is repetition, ;)

Buffy

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
×
×
  • Create New...