Computer Security Research - McAfee Avert Labs Blog: "I always get a lot of questions about confidence scams. These types of spam emails have been around almost as long as email has been available to the public. Confidence scams are a child of phishing scams, and the annoying little brother of lonely girl scams, always showing up at the wrong time or hiding just around the corner. They’re difficult to eliminate completely because they are always re-inventing themselves.
Confidence scams, like lonely girl scams, are attempting to relieve a target of their money by convincing them to give it up willingly for a cause. They can appeal to the compassionate heart by asking for help with an orphanage, or to a baser greed by asking for help smuggling money out of a country.
The emails themselves are generated by a sweatshop of workers who create an account on a free email website, fill in a vague template with plot points, and then send it off to random recipients. A different reply_to field is created in order to redirect any replies to another free email account which is there solely for the purposes of receiving the replies (the scammer assumes that the newly created sending account will be revoked for the spamming actions)."
1 comment:
Post a Comment