Did you get an email from Amazon telling you about an order that you don’t remember ordering? That’s probably because you didn’t – it’s a phishing scam! Don’t fall for it! The “Your Amazon.com Order” email, which purportedly comes from “digital-no-reply@amazon.com” actually is an effort to get you to point your web browser to BookSalon.kr (the actual phishing URL is https://www.theinternetpatrol.com/brick-wall/.

There is a series of SMS text message spams going around right now, from TM-GODSGIFT, that has people wondering. The messages from TM GodsGift say that you have won money – usually in the Coca Cola lottery or the Exxon Mobile draw. It’s all spam – it’s all a scam. You can ignore it – or you can report it. But whatever you do, don’t respond to a message from TM GodsGift.

A group of U.S.-based Internet service providers (ISPs) have announced that they are going to start charging their email users for processing the spam that is addressed to them. As the deluge of spam continues unabated, ISPs are seeking new ways to help offset the cost of processing the trillions of pieces of junk email that they are keeping out of their customers’ inboxes (or, in some cases, still delivering to their customers’ inbox or junk folder).

There is a new Western Union money transfer scam spam making the rounds. It thanks you for “using Western Union Money Transfer”, and gives you a fake confirmation receipt transaction number (“control number”) – in our case the Mone Transfer Control number used was 1629752260. The spam includes an attachment that is an HTML file named something like “WU account.html” – don’t open it!

Not content with sending fake Amazon confirmation emails, the outfit sending out the Canadian pharmacy spam is now sending out fake Amazon.com order cancellation emails, too, claiming that your Amazon order has been cancelled. “Amazon.com – Your Cancellation (0046-68878-96071)” says the email’s subject (although the “order number” may change) – but of course the link to check “ORDER INFORMATION” really takes you to a Canadian pharmacy spam site, hawking Viagra, Cialis and the like. In the example below, the fake cancellation contains links to https://www.theinternetpatrol.com/brick-wall/, which redirects to https://web.archive.org/web/20211230152715/http://weightbreezy.com/, which is a Canadian pharmacy spam site.

Now here’s a blast from the past. I was trolling Usenet recently (many of you may know it better as Google groups since Google borged Usenet), and I came across the letter to the editor that I wrote in reponse to a letter that the American Bar Association Journal had published, written by Martha Siegel (she of the Cantor and Siegal Green Card Lottery Spam infamy). In the letter, Ms. Siegel attempted to justify the mass-spamming of Usenet that she and her associate had done in the name of trying to drum up business for their law firm. It was, if not the first mega-spam, certainly the most high-profile of those among the first.

Project Honey Pot has just announced over one billion served – one billion pieces of spam served to Project Honey Pot that is – and with that milestone they have released their analysis of global spam trends and patterns, and it’s very interesting.

We’ve seen some idiotic mailing practices in our time, but of all of the dunderheaded bulk mailing “policies” we’ve seen, this one may take the idiot-cake: “You are receiving this message about Frappr because your name and email address were submitted to a Frappr Guest Map at some point in the past 5 years.” (“Frappr” because, presumably, frapper .com is owned by a domain squatter.)

Back in 2000, Thomas L. DiStefano, III, of Boca Raton, Florida, filed a patent for a “Method For Managing Bulk E-Mail Distribution”, in which the ‘invention’ was described as a method in which if not all email in an email run was delivered the first time, the sender would repeatedly send the email to the undelivered addresses, again and again, until all of the email was eventually delivered. In 2007, DiStefano’s company, Perfect Web Technologies, sued InfoUSA, for patent infringement. InfoUSA is the parent company to such email entities as YesMail, who famously sued anti-spam blacklist MAPS for calling them a spammer, and who in 2006 paid a $50,000 fine to the Feds for violations of the CAN-SPAM Federal anti-spam law.

Twitter is fed up, and their not going to take it any more. The thing with which they are apparently fed up is spammers polluting people’s Twitter streams with everything from “make money fast” scheme sites to porn. And so Twitter has added a “this is spam” button (well, actually a “report for spam” link) to everybody’s profile, so that now you can report them to Twitter HQ with a single click.

Ever wonder why there is so much spam for Viagra? Ever wonder “Who would ever buy this stuff?” Well, while the specific details of the “who” aren’t available, there are enough of them buying it to make spamming about Viagra and other similar meds very financially rewarding.

It’s one of the newest spam tactics – spam vacation messages. Here’s how it works: spammers sign up for mailing lists, never intending to read them. Instead they put themselves on permanent vacation status, create one of those infernal “I’m on vacation” messages full of their spam message, and let the vacation program do their spamming for them. If they’re lucky, the mailing list is one where the vacation message goes back to the entire mailing list. So far we’ve seen spam vacation messages hawking mydosell.com, wholesaler-electronic.com, qigefa.com, and easevshop.com.

The newest Twitter porn scam – where the Twitter users’ messages are primarily links to their x-rated website – entails the porn-pushing (or pron, if you prefer) Twitter user sending out a message thanking you for sending a “Follow Friday” their way. Only, of course, you did no such thing.

A rash of seemingly pointless spam (no links, no payload, no effort to get private information) is making the rounds, each one inquiring about the cost to get some form of music download, and each coming from a fake Gmail address, such as d12treskey@gmail.com, petersons.production@gmail.com, winstonfinancial@gmail.com and petrov.gazprom@gmail.com.

Spammers and malware pushers have turned in increasing numbers to the URL shortening services such as TinyURL, SNURL, bit.ly and is.gd as a way of getting by spam filters that recognize the actual URLs to spam and malware sites.