Tag: Spamming

Coming Down with Contactitis

Photo by freezelight CC

It’s a drag, but can be cured

Every website needs a way for visitors to send a message to its proprietors. Some sites provide an email address, but typically they have a form on a page that tends to be called Contact. That’s what I did when I set up a website for my publishing imprint, Perfidy Press. Having put together several sites already, I should have known better than to set up a contact page that wasn’t protected against robots, but gave it no thought. Naively, I presumed that only people who cared about my content would bother to contact me. That seems to have been the case for the first six months it was online, when one or two responses a week got dumped into my inbox, but in the last two months it’s been more like one or two a day, and they keep getting more bizarre.

Continue reading “Coming Down with Contactitis”

Unsafe Sex with Your Webcam

Mac Security Blog

It’s only the second week of the month, but I feel we already have a winner for October’s spam contest. Not only is it semi-literate, its author kindly apologizes for the broken English, but then goes on to kindly request 850 euro be deposited in his or her bitcoin account. Even if I had euros I wouldn’t know how to do that. Should I go to my bank with cash, ask for it in euros and tell them to change them into bitcoins? I’ve never had any bitcoins; have no idea what they even look like.

The message ostensibly came from a user named Janine at a tax consultancy, but Janine’s address may have been spoofed. To preserve my privacy, I’ve changed my address to “whomever,” but the actual address my extortionist sent this to is a mailbox I dedicate to receiving mailings from adobe.com that has only been used by them, up until now. See, way back in 2013 hackers purloined data for some 8 million credit card and 30 million email addresses from Adobe. The info was most likely put up for auction on the Dark Web. It took five years for that s!*t to hit the fan, but that’s not unusual. Yet another reason not to do business with those price-gouging bloodsuckers, but I digress. Continue reading “Unsafe Sex with Your Webcam”

Better than Winning the Lottery!

Today I received some exciting news from the Department of Homeland Security that I must tell you about! It’s not as if tidings such as this come in every day (well they do, actually, but not from the trusty Federal Government).

It seems that Mr. (Jeh) Johnson, who left his post as Secretary of Homeland Security on January 2oth, still has a desk there. He says he’s been assigned by President Trump himself to rectify cases of fraud concerning claims to assets and to track down their true owners. It seems, he informs me, that my family and I are the rightful owners of 17.5M USD sitting in a disused Wells Fargo account that a Mr. Steven Tilley—whom I don’t know—falsely claimed belonged to him. Fantastic that they caught him at it. I hope Tilley goes to prison for a long time. Continue reading “Better than Winning the Lottery!”