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Scam, Scam, Scam

One of the things that never ceases to amaze me about phishers is how incredibly creative they can be in writing text that encourages recipients to open their emails.
There have been two separate incident recently that inspired me to talk about phishing.
The first was watching viruses propagate through my local neighborhood mailing list. I live in Silicon Valley and we do have an email list for neighbors to talk, plan and generally share information. Last week one of the neighbors got infected with a virus, and their address started posting links to more viruses to the list. Over the weekend I watched half a dozen neighbors get infected and post more viruses to the list.
The second is the dozens of messages I’ve been receiving telling me there are naked photos of me on the Internet. They have a couple different forms. Some pretend to be concerned friends worried that my private photos have leaked. Others threaten legal action or that the police are investigating me. Still others tell me I’ve ruined a friendship by sharing these photos.
None of those things are true, of course. They’re all trying to get me to open a file and infect my machine with some virus or another.

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Working as intended

There’s a certain type of sender that thinks every ISP block or email delivered to the bulk folder is a false positive. They’re so sure that the filters aren’t actually supposed to catch their mail that they’ll spend any amount of money and do every possible thing to get their mail to the inbox.
The problem for these senders, though, is that their mail is exactly the type of mail filters are designed to catch. They’re sending mail without recipient permission. I’m not talking about the lists that get a few typos or problem addresses on them. I’m talking about senders that buy and trade mailing lists. I’m talking about senders that don’t believe they have to have permission to send mail.
This mail getting filtered is a sign that the filters are working as intended. They’re keeping the unsolicited email out.
A lot of us take for granted that all commercial mail, at least that isn’t selling fake watches or herbal viagra, is always sent with permission. But there’s an awful lot of mail out there that doesn’t even have a minor fig leaf of permission. Filters stop that mail. And senders have very little recourse when they do.

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You opted in

One thing I get in some of the comments here and in some of the discussions I have with email senders is that no commercial emailer ever sends unsolicited email. That, clearly, at some point the recipient opted in to receive mail and if that person doesn’t want mail they shouldn’t ever give out their email address.
I have an old yahoo address that’s used primarily as my Flickr account login. I don’t believe I’ve ever given out the address to anyone or opted in to anything. Anything’s possible, this address was created sometime in 2006 or 2007 and I may have tossed it into a form to test something. It’s certainly not an address I ever actually use.
Earlier this week I checked mail on the account. There were almost 700 messages in there. It was pretty amazing how much garbage this unused, unshared address collected. Notice the “clever” use of foreign alphabets and the number of legitimate companies who have acquired this address or hired people to mail me on their behalf. I’m sure some of it is phishing, too.

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