A piquant little spamlet to ring in the new year:
To: dan@dansdata.com
Subject: Ad Request...
From: Jami
Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2011 21:07:50 +0700 (ICT)Good Day,
Our company is interested in placing the below employment ad with your Newspaper today. We want you to get back to us with the cost to run our ad= for 3 weeks in Newspaper and print.
OUR AD COPY AS TO BE PLACED:
WE ARE SEEKING DYNAMIC RECEPTIONIST ORIENTED INDIVIDUALS WITH GREAT COMMU
NICATIONS AND
TYPING SKILLS NEEDED TO WORK ON BEHALF OF COMPANY THIS SERVICE REPRESENTA
TIVE WILL EARN UP TO
$2000 MONTHLY ANY JOB EXPERIENCE NEEDED.EMAIL US AT: resume20111@hotmail
.com IF INTERESTEDAlso, let me know if you do print category such as Yahoo Hot jobs, Monster,Carrier-builder OR ANY JOB SITE you have.Do you accept Visa or Master Credit Card, identify the type you accept.
I await the above quotation asap.
Best Regards,
Jami Erickson
I'll be sure to pass this on to my Carrier-building friends, "Jami"! They'll get back to you very soon about conventional versus nuclear power, aircraft complement and so on.
The only real question in my mind is whether this spammer and his how-dare-you-suggest-it-might-be-stolen credit card number is really trying to place these dodgy job ads, or whether it's just another attempt to get suckers directly, by waiting for replies that say "actually I'm not a newspaper, but boy, that job sounds sweet!"
Could be both, I suppose. Either way, the jobs themselves will surely turn out to be the usual money-mule or "deposit this fake cheque and then send us some real money" sort of scam.
The "if you do print category" word-salad also reminds me of the odd use of the word "do" in many African spam-scams, such as the immortal "and if you do accept credit card".
3 January 2011 at 5:16 pm
And now, in loosely-related news:
(It's not my picture, unfortunately.)
3 January 2011 at 10:46 pm
I would consider this mail to be in the same category as those "I would like to make a reservation for a room": primarily testing whether your mail address is live (although I don't really know if live addresses are still worth more in the spamlist business). The money-laundring bit would only work if the scammer actually hits a hotel (or in your case, an ad publisher or agent) that falls for the trick, which looks to me as being a rather ineffective way of collecting mules.
But I've found that most scammers aren't that smart, just very, very persistent.
4 January 2011 at 4:38 am
I used to have that exact response to phishers in WoW
4 January 2011 at 4:19 pm
Ziggyinc: you actually bothered responding to phishers? I just added them to my ignore list...
I have noticed a significant decrease, lately, in the quantity of spam hitting my gmail mailbox. Used to be >30/day, lately it's been 5-10, tops. And only 3/30 at the moment are advertising penis enlargements... About half seem to be of the "cut price medicines" type (incl. viagra, of course), but the rest seem a random mix of ads for otherwise legit products & services. I suspect they're just bait to get people to hand over credit card details, though (haven't bothered to examine any in more detail).
19 February 2011 at 10:31 pm
Yeah. Attempting to convince the sucker that he has been accidentally sent something intended for someone else, or otherwise given information he ordinarily wouldn't have, which gives him an unexpected windfall or advantage this one time only, is one of the top time-honored methods spammers (and con artists in general) use to separate idiots from their money. He'll want to move quickly, before the real newspapers start responding and placing the ad, because obviously the company will soon be flooded with applicants. But if he gets his resume in now, he'll be top-of-the-list! It's the basic formula of greed and urgency working together to overwhelm caution and good sense. (How do they get the idiot's money out of this one? Probably via standard Nigerian-style advance-fee fraud tactics, but that's just a guess.)