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There has been a new rash of "Receipt for your payment to" eBay Paypal phishing spam which is intended to elicit a shock response causing the target to rush to log into their Paypal account to figure out why they are being charged hundreds to thousands of dollars for an eBay purchase which they know that they didn't actually make. Imagine our shock to discover that VoIP provider Vonage has turned to comment spamming. Oh, they will probably deny it, but what else can you call it when their Online Marketing Manager, Costas Kariolis, shows up at an article about Skype on the Internet Patrol, and posts a comment about the Vonage offerings, with an SEO-formatted link back to the Vonage site? and also posts the exact same comment to articles about Skype on other sites? Reverend James Shea of Killdeer, ND, received an email from the White House, containing an invitation to meet Pope Benedict XVI during the Pope's recent visit to the United States. So he did what most of us would do - sent it to the spam folder. Only, it wasn't spam, it was a legitimate invitation. Oops. A new hack has Wordpress hackers disabling all of your Wordpress plugins (including, you see, Akismet or any other anti-spam comment spam stopper plugin), which then allows them to inject comment spam into your blog at will. So if you suddenly find yourself getting an enormous amount of comment spam all at once, or if you suddenly find your blog pages coming up blank (because with your plugins disabled, that often can be the case) you may be the victim of this latest plugin-disabling comment spam hack. Recently I got a notice that someone of whom I'd never heard was following me on Twitter. Now, this isn't all that unusual - it happens to me at least once or twice a day. But when I checked this person's profile, it said they were following 32,244 people! Yes, I'd run into a new breed of spammer - pushing a new breed of Twitter spam. Chinese cellular providers China Mobile and China Unicom together have over 500 million active cell phone accounts, and recently more than 200 million of these users received a stream of unwanted and unwelcome advertisements as text messages - cell phone spam. Both cell phone providers and the spammers received a stern talking to from the Deputy Head of China's State Council Office for Rectifying Malpractice (yes, really). People across the country are reporting telephone calls coming from the numbers (623) 238-6228 and (408) 587-2116. These calls claim that your car warranty is expiring, but they are really scam artists trying to steal your personal information and identity. So if the number appearing on your cellphone screen is either (623) 238-6228 or (408) 587-2116, don't answer it! Other numbers generating these spam identity theft calls include (202) 552-1332, (702) 520-1105, (609) 948-0971 and (562) 289-8136. Spammers are now cloaking their website domains in their spam by abusing the TinyURL service. In this example, the spam is being sent by Advanced-Intelligence.com, and the TinyURL resolves to their site at http://www.advanced-intelligence.com. Mega spammer Alan Ralsky has been indicted under Federal anti-spamming law, along with ten other spammers involved in Ralsky's operation, including Ralsky's own son-in-law, Scott Bradley ("Oh dad, how could you?) Other spammers charged include Judy Devenow, also of Michigan; James Bragg, of Arizona; California spammers John Brown, William Neil, Anki Neil, James Fite, Francis Tribble; and How Wai John Hui, of Vancouver, Canada and Hong Kong, and Peter Severa of Russia. To help avoid email spam, it's important to not post your email addresses openly on the Internet - for example, in comments on blogs, in user forums, and on social networking sites. You may think that this is obvious, but plenty of people still do it, and then wonder why they get so much Internet spam - for example spam from web-site contact form links. Good spam protection begins at home - to help avoid junk email spam reduce your own email address footprint and make your email addresses spam resistant. You can do this by posting your email address in a way that allows humans to know how to contact you, but which cannot be recognized as an email address by spamming programs. Here's how. Massive Gmail storage plus the awesome folder view provided by a Gmail account equals the perfect spam folder! If your anti-spam program can forward all detected spam to a separate email address, then you can create your own Gmail spam folder account too! Gmail mail is the perfect way to scan all of your spam for mail that you actually want, because the Gmail email folder view shows you the first sentence of the email along with the subject, making it super easy to determine if the mail is really spam or not without opening it! First, set up a Gmail account (sign up for Gmail at gmail . com here), then forward your spam to it. Now check Gmail mail to easily scan the contents of your spam folder to determine if there is any email you actually want. Here are step-by-step instructions, and a view of our Gmail spam folder account! Sure, there may be some cool email chain letters, but the reality is that they are still email chain letters, and that's just not ok. The most recent of the chain emails making the rounds is a Recipe Email chain email letter. Seems innocent, seems fun, even seems useful. But it's still chain mail, and it's still not ok. In fact, it's spam. Chain mail is illegal in the postal mail system, and it's just as unwelcome in the Internet email system. So you got email saying that you won a Toyota? You and thousands of others, in the latest round of the Toyota lottery scam! Here's the basic text of this spam scam - don't be taken in! By now you should now that you should never open a file which comes through in email, particularly if you are not expecting it, even if you know the sender. This certainly applies to the new rash of MP3 spam that is going around, which is actually audio stock spam for the pump and dump spammer scammers, who are pushing the publicly traded Text4Cars.com by Exit Only. The mega popular Facebook site has joined the ranks of social networking sites that trick you into providing your password so that they can steal your AOL , Yahoo, MSN, or other address book, and spam all of your contacts. Only this time it's with a twist - they are actually spamming your AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) contacts in your Buddy List! The spam starts out like this: "According to his Facebook status, Friend's Name (their username) is now "Friend's Nickname". Friend invites you to join Facebook and keep up with what he and your other friends are doing." What we want to know is WHY are AOL, Yahoo, and MSN continuing to let this go on? A new version of the old 419 advance fee fraud scam has surfaced, this time claiming that you stand to receive a "long overdue inheritance / contract payment". Does the title of this article on Quechup and spam sound familiar? It should, and it's no accident. Substitute Flixster for Quechup, and you'll find that we had to write the exact same article about Flixster earlier this year. So if you get spam from Quechup saying that someone "has invited you as a friend on Quechup.. the social networking platform sweeping the globe", well, don't blame that someone, blame Quechup. A new wave of spam hitting everybody's inboxes takes the form of a welcome to one or another website and service, complete with temporary login information and a link to 'change your temporary password'. The subjects all say some variant of "Login Information", "Member Details", "Registration Details" or, even, occasionally, "Internet Techincal Support" (sic). What they also all have in common is that if you click on that link, your computer will have just become a botnet pimp's newest bitch. Our friends over at SpamShield have come up with a really nifty use for Google maps - they have created a spam map - they call it "Spam World" - which maps where all the spam is coming from - around the world - in real time (well, updated every fifteen minutes). If you are looking for a good free anti spam spamfighter - a free spam blocker or free spam filter - to help you deal with spam email, here are a couple of free spam filters and free spam blockers - including free anti spam software - that you may not have heard about! Now you can deal with your spam mail with your choice of a free Internet spam filter or free anti spam software! There is even free anti spam software for World of Warcraft users (SpamMeNot and one version of SpamSentry). A rash of virus-laden spam has been going around posing as Hallmark e-cards or other e-cards. "You've received a greeting ecard from a friend" says the subject. Variations include "You've received a greeting card from a partner", "You've received a greeting postcard from a class-mate", and "You've received a greeting ecard from a class mate". The "ecard" appears to come from such legitimate sounding addresses as hallmark.com, MyPostcards.com, postcards.org, e-cards.com, NetFunCards.com, FunnyPostcards.com, Greeting-Cards.com, and VintagePostcards.com. Whatever the variation, it's not only spam, it's almost certainly carrying a virus or a trojan which will turn your computer into a spam- and virus-sending robot. The trio that brought us Blue Security and their Blue Frog, the DOSing service that planned to DOS spammers, and that went belly up after a spammer instead DOSed them (well, duh), has apparently decided that spamming is more lucrative (again, well, duh), and founded a new company called Collative to do just that. Talk about the latest detailed news on botnets! The ultimate of an inside look at botnets - it is the real, first-hand account of what happened this week when a zombie botnet woke up, based on some unseen signal triggered or programmed by the botnet owner, and took over hundreds of customer computers at a large US broadband ISP. MySpace has announced that it has filed a lawsuit against the once (and future?) King of Spam, Sanford Wallace. MySpace says that Wallace "implemented a phishing scheme to falsely gain access to MySpace user profiles. Recently I started getting invitations to join Flixster from complete strangers. Obviously, this was spam, but why were these complete strangers sending it to me? And why were they always from AOL and Hotmail? Now people are asking - is Flixstr accessing your AOL and Hotmail contacts list and spamming them in your name? There is a rather bizarre bit of spam going around this week. It appears to be aimed at anti-spammers, but others are getting it too. It's a very short email, which says, in toto, anti-spammers are lamers subj, regards, spammer. "Greetings from Iraq," the subject line says. Who wouldn't at least give that a glance the first time they see that in their inbox? And that's exactly what scammer "Merrill Melvin Hansley", a supposed security manager of STE,CCPLUS STORAGE SARL storage company in Iraq, is counting on. While complaints continue to roll in about cell phone spam from SMS text message spammers Mblox and their partners Dada Mobile, new complaints are starting to surface about new SMS spammers FunMobile, Freeze Mobile (a/k/a FreezeMob), Free Mobile and My Lifestyle. FunMobile may come through with the short code 99621, and Freezemob as short code 36726. mBlox, the company that bills itself as "The World's Largest Mobile Transaction Network", has just issued a press release exclaiming "mBlox Publishes Record Off-Portal SMS Transactions in 2006." Of course, as Internet Patrol readers know, countless people have received phone spam from mBlox and their partners DadaMobile and Nevis. In fact, there are more than 180 comments right here on the Internet Patrol complaining about mBlox, DadaMobile, and Nevis Mobile. It was the oddest collecton of spam-related searches I'd ever seen: print_silk_test print spam_silk_test spam loading, print_silk_test print, spam_silk_test spam, print spam_silk_test spam delete_silk_test, spam_silk_test spam delete_silk_test delete loading, spam_silk_test spam, delete_silk_test delete loading yahoo, print_silk_test print spam_silk_test spam loading yahoo beta, spam_silk_test spam delete_silk_test delete, print spam_silk_test spam delete_silk_test yahoo loading, and print spam_silk_test spam delete_silk_test yahoo. What, I wondered, did it all mean? What is a silk test? Is this some bizarre new spammer lingo? Perhaps a spamming program? When you are thinking "Oh, how much I hate spam" (does anybody ever actually think "I want spam"?), and you want to exact some of your own spam revenge, your thoughts may turn to becoming a spam killer. But others vent through more gentile avenues, such as spam haiku, spam poetry or, this, penning the ultimate junk email. Spam laden with trojan viruses are running high this month - primarily the Small.DAM Trojan - so be extra careful. Common subject lines include those about "Storm Batters Europe", updates on Condoleeza Rice, and claims that Putin is dead and Hussein is alive. The subject lines vary, but the Trojan payload remains the same: executable files surreptitiously installed on your computer, with file names such as "Full Story.exe", "Full Text.exe", "Full Video.exe", "Video.exe", "Full Clip.exe" or "Read More.exe", or such. "Coca-Cola End Of Year Bonanza," the email subject screams. It then goes on to tell you that you have won a prize - this is the official prize notification - for the year end bonanza held by Coca-Cola in conjunction with the Netherlands American Tobacco company. In case you're in any doubt, this is a scam. There is a lot of talk and questions going around about the newest stock spam for Texhoma Energy - the ones with the subject line of "You Neeed to Read this Grand Letter" or "Momentous Message". The bottom line - ignoreit. In a move which may have surprised nobody more than it surprised canned meat company Hormel, Hormel lost their legal effort to regain control over their trademark "SPAM". Ronald Guilmette and his company, Infinite Monkeys.com, have filed a $27.4 million lawsuit against spam king Scott Richter and his OptInRealBig.com. Richter claims he is no longer a spammer, Ronald Guilmette says it ain't so. Also named in the lawsuit are four of Richter's customers, including Florida-based National Associate Credit Services, Inc.. The "this is spam" button is not an unsubscribe button! The "this is spam" button is a "whack this sender because they sent me this email without permission" button. There has been a recent increase in the number of spammers who are using Google URLs in their spam in an effort to trick people. They way they do this is to camoflage their URL so that it looks like a Google URL. After all, nearly everyone knows, recognizes, and trusts Google. How sinister could clicking on something which appears to be a Google search result be? "We have a runner!" "Small cap stock!" "Could DPER.PK be the next Exxon?" If you are sick of getting stock spam - that spam hawking some worthless stock in an effort to drive up the price so that those behind the spammer can cash in and get out, then here are a couple of ways to have fun with that spam. I have no idea what this spam says, but it sure is cute! Lockergnome is being spoofed in a massive spam campaign which appears to be coming through Apple's own mail servers! The spam includes fake confirmations, and actual Lockergnome newsletters. Email claiming to be a CNN newsflash with the headline "Osama Bin Laden Discovered Dead" is making the rounds. It contains a file called "photo+article.zip". Don't open it! If you have ever received mortgage spam, you've probably been spammed by Ryan Pitylak. Now following lawsuits against him by Microsoft and the Texas AG, Pitylak says he's going straight and doing anti-spam consulting. A new Black Frog anti-spam model, based more than loosely on the defunct Blue Frog service, is being set up over at Okopipi. Will this one succeed? And will it be more ethical? We think that the answer to both is "no". Secure your computer, and take back the net! At least one in every three PCs has been compromised and is being used by spammers and phishers as part of their zombie computer "botnets". And the owners don't even know! Secure your computer for free. We tell you how! Blue Security and their controversial Blue Frog program suffered a fatal blow when Blue Security CEO Eran Reshef concluded that the cost to the Internet of their ongoing battle with spammer PharmaMaster, and possibly others, was too high. It was inevitable. Blue Frog, the "anti-spam" company which tries to get spammers to stop spamming by spamming the webforms of spammers who spam Blue Frog's customers, had their "do not spam" email list stolen by spammers, and now that list of Blue Frog customers is getting spammed. Word on the street has it that Alan Ralsky, the so-called Spam King, has been taken into custody by the Department of Justice (DOJ), where they are attempting to put the squeeze on him to have him give up all his spammer cronies and their spamming networks. Spammers Optin Global, Vision Media Limited, Qing Kuang “Rick” Yang, and Peonie Pui Ting Chen have been held accountable for affiliate spam sent on their behalf. Is it a scam? Is it spam? Is it phishing? Is it legal? Someone calling themselves Garren Fitzenreiter, using the email address admin@keithware.com, is sending people Paypal invoices out of the blue, with the subject "help me pay for my inspection sticker ticket and ill love you forever. thanks" "Bot Herder" Jeanson James Ancheta, the BotNet operator taken down by the Feds, told colleagues of operating the botnet of more than 400,000 infected PCs, "It's immoral, but the money makes it right." The state of Utah has issued their first citation under their recently-enacted Child Protection Email Address Registry and related laws. Too bad they slept through class the day they taught Federal and international jurisdiction. Mblox is back in the phone spam limelight, this time as the front man for company Dadamobile, targeting Cingular, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile users. DadaMobile is also known by their short code, 63232. Larry Moore, dying in Dubai of prostate and oesophageal cancer, begs from his deathbed in a Dubai hospital for you to help him distribute his wealth to charity. Don't do it. Downloading the Crazy Frog ringtone lead to text message spam being sent to the user's cell phone from Crazy Frog ringtone creator Jamba. Now Jamba's service provider, mBlox, has been fined for Jamba's wrongdoing. Free Speech Coalition sues Utah over Child Protection Email Address Registry Hallmark email cards really show that you don't care enough to send the very best. Plus, ecards are bad for the recipient. And ecards are often spoofed and sent as a vector for viruses. Microsoft's legal team has successfully tracked a zombie network to its seeders and spam sources, and is now suing them to the wall. A splog is a garbage website put up for the sole purpose of either displaying ads or linking to another target site to give that target site more inbound links. In that way splogs serve to artificially inflate the page rank of the target site. The Spanish lottery scam, also known as the "Spanish Sweepstate Lottery", "Spanish International Lottery", and even "Spanish International Program" has hit the net. Whether it's from Blanco Lopez, or someone else, it's still a scam. The DMA has announced that they are requiring all of their members to adopt an email authentication mechanism. According to them, "there are several interoperable, inexpensive and easy to implement solutions available on the market today." Talk about people doing stupid things! How stupid do you have to be to make a death threat against an officer who is investigating you? Spammer stupid! This stock chart offers stock analysis of the stock which comes recommended in spam. Are those hot stock tips really worth anything? A form spam blocker has been developed by a service offering secure, hijack-proof web forms. It's guaranteed, it's cheap, and it's secure! What more could you ask for? The British Lottery International scam is one of the latest Internet scams. As the Katrina scams wind down, the British International Lottery scam is again picking up steam. If you get this email scam from British Lottery International, don't be taken in - just delete it! Internet Marketing may have a chance to clean up its image, with the retirement of Queen of Spam Laura Betterly. Betterly, who gave work-at-home moms as well as Internet marketers a bad name, says now that spam is bad. Hurricane Katrina email hoaxes are already starting to fly, to add insult to the horrible injury already suffered by the thousands of people in Katrina's path. This first Hurricane Katrina email hoax claims that the Red Cross will donate money for each email sent. An update for Outlook 2003's junk email filter promises to make the junk email filter even more effective. And it's free! Ring-back advertising is sure to annoy your friends and colleagues when they call you and instead of hearing your cell phone ring, they get Perceptive Impression's ring-back spam, brought to you by Promotel, Inc.. Bluecasting says that what they do is not spamming, because you asked for it. The Internet security industry is taking notice, and they say that it's dangerous. Spam blockers have come a long way. The right spam blocker, coupled with a few tricks of the trade, can help you to tame your inbox. Bluecasting has been accused of Bluetooth spamming, and tries to explain why what they do is different. Overwhelmed by the onslaught of garbage which is clogging your inbox? Embarrassed by the smut and insulted by the scams? Feeling violated by the fact that spammers manage to shove their junk in your private inbox no matter what you do? Frustrated as h*ll and don't ... APOLOGIES TO LOCKERGNOME READERS! AUNTY's REDIRECT FROM LOCKERGNOME FOR "HOW TO STOP SPAM - FOR WINDOWS USERS" DID NOT WORK, AND SO YOU CAN READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE [Continue reading How to Stop Spam - For Windows Users] King of Spam (make that former King of Spam) Scott Richter has closed a chapter in his book of spam kingness, and has settled a lawsuit with Microsoft for a cool $7million. Which of course leads one to wonder just how much ... SpamButcher has just published a series on how to kill network spam zombies. As readers know, the Federal Trade Commission recently issued an open plea to ISPs to get rid of the spam zombies on their networks. And even though a ... Even the very best spam filters need some training, and even the very best spam filters are only as good as their training. This is true for the spam filtering capabilities built into your email program as well as any add-on spam ... Spam filters are programs designed to filter out spam from your inbox. Once you're on the spammers' lists, these may be your only realistic defence against spam. Most add-on anti-spam programs use several of these methods to keep spam out of your inbox. User ... In this article, Aunty Spam is going to help you with the basics of what you need to know in order to choose a spam filter which is right for you. The first place to start in choosing an add-on anti-spam program is a ... Call it what you like, the act of transmitting a message, image, sound, or any other data, to someone's Bluetooth device via that Bluetooth, without their permission, is spamming - Bluespamming to be precise - pure and simple. (It's also Bluejacking.) However, ... In a stunning victory (please note irony in use of the word "stunning"), a Federal court has slapped down the appeal of high volume email deployer White Buffalo Ventures, an online dating service also doing business as LongHornSingles.com. The reason for the ... The Knesset, Israel's parliament, has just passed a tough new law aimed at spam, unsolicited text messages, and junk faxes. The new law requires a recipient's opt-in, meaning that a commercial message must be solicited - the recipient must have agreed to ... In a survey to test whether top e-tailers are allowing consumers to opt out of receiving promotional or marketing messages, the FTC has determined that 89 percent of the online merchants it tested are honoring requests to halt future mailings. The CAN-SPAM Act, which ... Nigeria really seems to be doing all the right things to bring under some semblence of control the flood of financial scams which originate within its borders, including the infamous "419 spam scam". Earlier this month the Nigerian courts sentenced a ... |