At 11:37 CT today, a community conscious member of SoberCircle brought it to my attention that there was some spam making the rounds through member’s inboxes. Thank God for a loyal member base. This goes back to the principals discussed in Laying Down the Law on Your Social Networking Website. I would have caught this within an hour or so by looking through my spam auditing application. Fortunately, this member gave me a heads up before I ran that report.
Here’s the message:
Hello My Dear!
Hello My Dear!
i am miss Favour i saw your profile and become intrested i will like to know more about you please contact me at , (wfavour99@yahoo.com) please do not reply to me in the website because i will not have the time to answer you there, just send your mail to my yahoo id then i will send my picture for you to know whom i am. remeber age, coloure and distance dose\’nt matter but what matters is true love.
Your\’s Lovely New Friend
wfavour99@yahoo.com
Does it get any more blatant than this? It never ceases to atmaze me. Every spam message we have had on the website in recent months has followed this general pattern. And this is not a bot doing this. The process and send times are way too slow for a bot. So where is this coming from you might ask??? :
person: Mody Ndiaye
address: SOCIETE NATIONALES DES TELECOMMUNICATIONS
address: Sonatel
address: Dakar
address: Senegal
They mostly come from the wonderful West African nation of Senegal. Its insane.
Why do these people want to connect via you email address?
Most likely these individuals are low on the food chain of an organized crime scheme that plots to engage in an email correspondence where they promise to send you a picture of themselves, only to be a file laced with a trojan that can then steal data from your computer. The most common trojan for this is a keystroke recorder that tracks when you login to sensitive sites like bank accounts and credit cards. Once these people have your login info they can then setup transfers from these accounts.
The second scheme is much more rudimentary in nature but also lethal if done effectively. Scammers are constantly looking for susceptible users to run phising schemes against. Chances are, if you are naive enough to fall for the first email, you will fall for further phishing schemes later (i.e. your bank has recently updated its systems and needs you to reenter your login information).
Don’t Fall For The Bait!!!
If any member approaches you at random and asks you to start a correspondence outside of the website, don’t go for it. If you are remotely intrigued about the offer, try to continue the dialog on that website for at least a couple of days. If its bogus, the perpetrators aren’t going to waste their time trying to scam a single person. These people are only interested in mass numbers. Always look at websites you visit and pay close attention to the base part of the URL. If it is your bank, your bank’s website is yourbank.com, make sure the part of the URL before the / is yourbank.com. Often, scammers like to use urls like login.yourbank.com.oiacis.ru/. If you were clicking on this link, all your information entered will not go to yourbank.com, but to oiacis.ru. This is how the game works and its time to wise up to it. Please remember that financial institutions will NEVER approach you through email to ask for sensitive information.
