"someone else is using your photos"

Posted under A Geek Dad's Life, Blog Posts, Software Design

Those clever spammers have done it again!  Every few years, spammers do something so clever and impressive that I pause to admire the ingenuity of those bastards.

In the past, they have come up with the variable sized non-gaussian speckled image to embed ads for E.D. products, and they have invented English-pattern gibberish generators to fool our language filters.

This time around, they have harnessed the power of CRM and e-mail customization combined with advanced (human-assisted?) screen-scraping to compile and send sophisticated customized e-mail campaigns. 

Here is a screenshot of the e-mail that arrived in my inbox today.  Wow.  That poor Romanian girl with broken Engrish. She obviously just wants to help me.  I’d better reply to her e-mail to answer her question!

This is a classic phish to collect valid e-mail addresses, but with a new, elegant, highly-customized twist.  Just look at the file names, and the use of my name with the second instance missing the capitalization as if Poor Romanian Girl had just mistyped it.  It is a thing of beauty.

If I were a sucker wishing to set the poor Romanian girl straight, I would reply to the e-mail address that she supplied… and my e-mail address would be added to their spam database of ‘verified’ e-mail addresses.  Ka-ching$.  OR, if I were to e-mail the supposed imposter named in the message, my e-mail address would get added to the same database.  Ka-ching$.  Ingenious.

(This e-mail could also be an attempt to form a sympathy relationship to prosecute another more devious scam involving the Russian mafia, but I sure hope not.  Those Russian scams are scary as hell.  They are worse than the South African ‘help me get my money out of the country’ scams.)

Whatever the end-game, they are bastards.  Brilliant craftsmanship, though.  Bastards.

p.s. update: What kind of mind freak would that have been if the pictures were actually of me?!  Maybe that is the next step for them…  *shudder*