Archive for the ‘Spam Dangers’ Category

This is a variation of the usual PayPal account phishing scam. A couple of glaring spelling errors helps, along with the fact that there’s NO email address for the recipient in the headers.

Bot nets are the Holy Grail of spammers, phishing gangs and other malicious individuals and criminal organizations. These are global networks of “slave” computers — whose owners have no idea that their machines are being used to send millions of spam, phishing, adware, spyware and malware messages every day. They may wonder why their computers run slowly, and that available processing resources seem to be strangely low.

How on earth do people’s computers end up being hooked into these worldwide bot networks?

Easy.

They open spam messages with attachments with no idea what they contain.

They download free games, music, videos, screensavers, etc, etc, etc with adware, spyware and other malware (including keyloggers, trojans, viruses and worms) attached or embedded. (Keyloggers record your keystrokes when entering usernames and passwords for everything from your Facebook account to your bank account, then send them to the vermin who sent them to you.)

A current crop is the “Please view my resume (or CV)” scam. Take a look at these messages we’ve received over recent weeks. They all claim to be from different people, but the messages are all the same (including misspelling “quite interested”), they contain attachments all around the same size and you open them at your peril.

Read the rest of this entry »

I just received a spam message, allegedly sent by someone in California, offering to send my advertising messages to 44,000,000 verified PayPal account holders.

The whole thing sounds very plausible and attractive, and I’m sure the spammer will make a lot of money from the mindless morons who take up the offer without thinking about it, other than to see dollar signs and overnight success.

WARNING!

This is a SCAM, and falling for it could cost you not only the money you pay to the spammer, but your Internet access, your PayPal account, your email service and your assets — including your home, cars and business.

How do I know it’s a scam?

Apart from long experience exposing scams and scammers, there are plenty of tell-tale warning signs and plain, common sense reasons why this is NOT legitimate. Here’s a short list of a few of them…
Read the rest of this entry »