OT Scam email detail (new to me)

Oct 03, 2022 Last reply: 4 years ago 15 Replies

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HVS 4 years ago

I like to think I'm familiar with most of the tricks of scam emails, but noticed something new (to me, anyway).

In the last couple of days I've had some "you're on a list of three winners to receive a £1,000 voucer/a new Tesla/whatever" phishings. All the usual flags are there -- not-bad-but-clearly-non-native English, addressed to the name in the email address ("Dear office"), with a button to click to "confirm your details".

The interesting thing is that the hyperlink (masked by using "bit.ly") isn't limited to the button: the whole of the email appears to be live, including blank areas and the grey background to either side of the text. So clicking anywhere at all on the email (which could easily be done accidently) would presumably send you to the dodgy website.

This may everywhere, but I've not noticed that before. It's quite clever, ekchelly, so that they're not relying solely on suckers who actively click on links.

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Information here may be outdated?

Tim Streater 4 years ago

Often the whole of the email body just consists of an image with a link behind it. They do that to make it more dangerous to click as you observed, but also to reduce the amount of real text there, thus trying to fool spam filters that analyse the text.

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Chris Green 4 years ago

Yet another good reason for using a command line/text mode E-Mail program. :-)

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billy bookcase 4 years ago

Scary

Would a spam filter recognise *any* text displayed in the form of an image ?

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Tim Streater 4 years ago

No, but there's the subject line as well. My spam filter includes that with body text, if any. And one can do a certain amount with ordinary filters, too.

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zall 4 years ago

Makes more sense to use one with a decent UI which asks you to confirm that you want to follow an embedded link.

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SteveW 4 years ago

But anyone sensible has their email reader set to not display images or remote content by default.

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SteveW 4 years ago

No need. Any decent email reader will have options (usually set by default) to not display images or remote content, unless the user specifically opts to do so.

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Brian Gaff 4 years ago

I'm getting apparently blank emails supposedly from virgin media which if you hit enter on they take you to a carbon copy of the Virgin site, but since I'd never have believed anyone who sends text in graphics like this, its a bit of a giveaway. Brian

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wasbit 4 years ago

Or turn off external content

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Joe 4 years ago

Or indeed not render HTML at all.

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Joe 4 years ago

Sensible people who insist on sending HTML emails include a text alternative for people like me, including all the links. Most do, some don't.

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Chris Green 4 years ago

Which is why I use a command line/text mode program. I *can* view HTML but 99.9% of the time I don't need to.

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Rob Morley 4 years ago

Aren't those mutually exclusive conditions?

Too often it's just "your email program can't display this content" when of course it can,, I just chose not to, and sometimes "view this in your browser". But if they can't be bothered to supply alternative text I often can't be bothered to look at the HTML version. If something is probably dodgy but I'm still curious I'll just disable networking before clicking anything.

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