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Get spammed by a friend – clever trick! Plus sometimes good things happen too: IT Week site
Read the following and check out your reaction, the names in italics are the replacements for the actual names:
World Famous Retailer, in conjunction with Known Company Homes, are giving away free vouchers.
World Famous Retailer are trying word-of-mouth advertising to introduce its products and the reward you receive for advertising for them is free non-refundable vouchers to be used in any of their stores.
To receive your free vouchers by e-mail all you have to do is to send this email out to 8 people (for £100 of free vouchers).
Within 2 weeks you will receive an e-mail with your vouchers attached. They will contact you through your e-mail address. Please mark a copy to: Andy.curran@known company homes.com
Well my immediate reaction was to blame the store for turning peoples' friends into spammers and by using this ruse bypass spam protection, and then reflecting on whether this was the next stage in spamming now the so called ‘King of Spammers’ has been shut down on the USA. I guess righteous indignation would probably sum up our reactions.
I got my copy of this mail as an attachment in a mail from a colleague who was wise enough not to forward by e mail with all the possible consequences of exposing addresses, and as is often the case in these things the obvious is not the whole story.
The mail suggested that I and others to whom she sent a copy might want to check it out and think about responding. Well, I didn’t get a chance to check it out immediately but within a few hours a further mail arrived indicating the whole thing to be a scam. The address to which the email was to be copied was a blind and the result would be a rich collection of perfectly valid email addresses. Actually the really clever piece is that the scam collects the addresses in pairs, one belonging to each friend, and that’s the most prized thing of all; a trusted relationship.
Just imagine your response to a good friend asking you to do something that seems pretty innocent; i.e. are you still banking with toy bank and at which branch? Clever scam!! You have been warned that they are getting smarter!
This has been an unusual blog piece so while I am on the topic of the web in our lives I would like to add a positive note. I use the web site of IT Week, a UK publication available as a weekly paper and as a web site, for its good summary of the news of the past seven days. It’s excellent for catching up when you have been on the road for a week. I was disappointed to find this part of the site wasn’t responding, so much so that I decided to invoke the ‘contact us’ button and ask where the pages were.
I was surprised and delighted to get a personal reply approximately two and a half hours later from David Neal the online editor promising to sort this out. That’s the web at its best! Thanks David you got my loyal readership.
Posted by Andy Mulholland on July 23, 2007 | 
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Comments
# on July 31, 2007 10:40 AM, Madhuri said:
There are different kinds of spams starts with friends name to sweepstakes using many prestigious companies name & its associates.
Overview of those mails looks like real message. But when we keenly observe we can find out some special chars or some unethical creation.( In very minute way)
Keeping all these thinks in our mind we have use our spam protecter or spam killer in such a advanced way that we can at least prevent those mails reading.It is better to elobrate knowledge on filtering process.
# on August 1, 2007 11:39 AM, andy mulholland said:
interesting, what spam preventer are you using to locate such fine detail?
# on August 2, 2007 12:28 PM, Madhuri said:
Yes, I do have basic knowledge on spam killer. I will try to recollect advance usase of spam protector. Its functionalities & its settings from security related stuffs.
# on August 4, 2007 12:05 AM, Lee Provoost said:
Andy, last year a wrote a blogpost where I was doing some simple calculations to show that people should think a bit more before forwarding spam :-)
http://blogs.webcoder.be/lee/2006/03/17/spam/
# on August 6, 2007 8:46 AM, Madhuri Konnur said:
Thanks,for nice article on spam. Even yesterday only we saw one SMS on our mobile.
Stating " Money will be giving to u by registering ur information in this site".
Even we have protect our cell phones...
# on August 6, 2007 9:27 AM, andy mulholland said:
I really think cell phones hi lee
yes its interesting to ask the question on how we spam each other in several ways. ie unwanted copies are as much spam as an external spammer hitting us.
Hi Madhuri
I think that cell phones will be the next target for spam as the spammers realise they can use locations to direct you to buy in a near by shop, visit a bar etc.
And as part of that the directory structure of cell phones i suspect to be less protected than in PCs too
# on August 28, 2007 4:51 AM, nkosi_2010worldcup@yahoo.co.uk said:
nkosi_2010worldcup@yahoo.co.uk
# on September 3, 2007 8:31 PM, AKINFELEYETONY said:
TGSDG
# on September 3, 2007 8:31 PM, AKINFELEYETONY said:
TGSDG
# on September 19, 2007 9:00 AM, Adam Law said:
TGSDG
adamlaw02@avj.com.au
# on October 3, 2007 1:11 PM, Yardy said:
Nice useful and informative article, but still i think Spam Filtering may reduce the number of spam for a short while but you cant say that it is an ultimate solution to Spamming. The reason is that the Spammers are aware of these filtering techniques whether it is Filtering with any popular spam tracker. There are many websites available that are providing the information on Anti-Spamming Solutions but most of this information is either irrelevant or not useful. I have recently visited a website that I would like to suggest Spam-Filtering, Comment Spam, Anti-Spam, Anti-Spam Solutions Website
# on October 3, 2007 1:15 PM, Yardy said:
http://www.anti-spam-info.com
i think its a reliable source against spamming.
# on October 6, 2007 9:16 AM, andy mulholland said:
thanks for the tip - hope its not a commercial one?
anybody else got any suggestions?