Possible new email swindle?

Harry Bloomfield :

Why on earth would anybody give that more than half a second's consideration before deleting it?

Mike Barnes has brought this to us :

Indeed, but people do fall for them.

Old grannies do

But I can's see an old granny falling for this.

Does anyone with appropriate skills ever fall for it?

tim

on 09/09/2013, tim..... supposed :

Obviously enough do, or they would find no value in sending these out.

It might not cost anything, but to make it worth while, there has to be a return.

More to the point, given the massive number of variations on the same theme, is there any point in cluttering up newsgroups with such warnings? I'm sure it's well intentioned Harry but if everyone starts posting scam email warnings to usenet the value of this group as a source of DIY info would be seriously affected.

If it was genuinely novel *and convincing* then I'd agree that it might be worth sharing a warning but an unsolicited overseas job offer doesn't fall into that category IMO.

Tim

Yes, its so targetted how on earth could they find the right folk to send it to. Are you sure its not just anouther way to get folks email addresses to sell on as a list of known good ones. Not that that matters these days really. Brian

You mean before marking it as spam.

Why would it get through the spam filter?

It is so far as I could make out an entirely new theme, there was nothing I could see about such a ploy on the internet.

They're asking for a CV, so if you send it you've parted with a lot of personal information, which is extremely foolish unless you trust the people you're sending it to.

Looks genuine enough to me. I'll forward it to my mate for verification. He'll know, as he is the Minister of Oil in Nigeria. In fact it's only a matter of time before I become incredibly rich as he should have all my bank details by now.

mark

Tim Streater :

I don't, actually.

And ITYM *after* marking it as spam. :-)

Probably not but they almost certainly aren't after you to fill a job, they just want (bits of) your identity... Bung the chunks in a database and mine it for links than connect various chunks together.

I'm pondering about a "marketing" one I got titled "JOHNNIE WALKER

-Seeking Car Advert- Make extra income". Basically $500/week (dollars) if you agree to have your car "auto wrapped" with an advert for JOHNNIE WALKER for at least a month. No upfront payment, indeed they send you $300 up front by cheque. They do want name, address, car details, phone numbers...

The header doesn't give anything away just one step before it reaches the machine that talked to mine. Bear in mind if two bits of spam make it to my in box in a week that's a lot of spam, most gets rejected at the SMTP level by one means or another.

I get a lot of spam claiming to be from well-known institutions and organisations. I find that the easiest way to check those out is to hover the mouse over the return link. In Windows Mail at least, this generates the complete address, which of course is never (so far) really that of the bank or company or whatever that it pupports to be.

No, because once I've marked it as spam it vanishes off the the spam folder.

Tim Streater :

Ah I get you now - you meant that I meant half a second's consideration before marking it as spam; I read it as deleting it before marking it as spam, and I'm sure you can see why that didn't make any sense.

Forgive my misunderstanding; in my world there is no spam folder, there is no facility to mark a message as spam, and there is no spam to speak of.

I have 571 spam messages dating back to end of March this year. It only goes that far back because when I wrote my email client, in addition to implementing a spam filter I added code such that the user can configure a time period after which spam gets moved from the spam folder to the Trash.

There's always going to be spam, because there's always going to be people sending you mails you don't want. Only some of these will be "classical spam", such a dick-enhancers, swiss watches and the like. Some of the stuff I consider spam, you may well be avidly waiting for, and vice versa. Thass why a spam filter, to be any good, has to be trainable by the user, not the ISP.