Joe Wein’s blog

While researching some information, I came across a Google hit that looked like what I was looking for, but when I opened the page, none of the text in the preview paragraph was there. Somebody must have fed bogus contents to GoogleBot to attract searches.
Instead of the expected information I found myself on a scareware [...]

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A bit over a year ago I wrote here about the “New Shopping, new life” spam that was sent from hacked free webmail accounts to advertise fake Chinese online shops. Recently I am seeing a lot more spam like that, mostly using hacked Hotmail accounts. Here is a typical example:

hello：
Please forgive us to disturb your [...]

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It happened after the Indian ocean tsunami and after Hurricane Katrina. It’s happening again with the earthquake in Haiti that has killed tens of thousands and left hundreds of thousands injured, homeless, hungry or without medical treatment: Scammers in Nigeria and elsewhere are stealing money meant for victims of the disaster.
If you think there [...]

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Since Google ranks sites primarily by how many other pages and sites link to them, unethical people have been trying to boost their site rankings by tricking others into creating links to them.
Link exchange spam, i.e. unsolicited offers to reciprocally create links to each other’s sites, has been around for many years. Recently I [...]

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A few years ago I created the Scam-O-Matic (www.scamomatic.com), a website that every month has helped thousands of people worldwide by automatically diagnosing online fraud emails that people have submitted to it. Scamomatic.com recognizes fake lotteries, “dead customer” scams, “dying widow” scams and many other common formats from scammers from Nigeria that you may have [...]

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Be careful if you receive an email like the following:
We are interested to buy your domain name YOUR-DOMAIN-HERE and offer to buy it from you for 80% of the appraised market value.
As of now we accept appraisals from either one of the following leading appraisal companies:
- fleos.com
- sedo.com
If you already have an appraisal please forward [...]

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Over the past year I’ve been getting a steady trickle of “friend requests”, i.e. invitations to join a service, for a website called SiliconIndia. Virtually all the supposed senders were women from India. Job titles included Software Engineer, Business Analyst and HR Executive. Most were very pretty. By that I mean not just better than [...]

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For about a year I have been receiving spam emails like this one below. They all look like they’ve been sent by private individuals somewhere in the world (usually from Yahoo or Hotmail accounts) but advertise companies in China:
hi:
New shopping new life!
How are u doing these days?Yesterday I found a web of a [...]

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I never really got used to the idea of MySpace “friends” and Facebook “friends”, a concept that seems to appeal mostly to teenagers seeking peer-approval. Friends are not objects you collect like others collect postal stamps or or sports memorabilia. Real friends are there for each other when we need someone. With my friends, years [...]

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You can tell that an anti-spam tool is becoming too effective when spammers start trying to work around it.
Such is the case with Spam URL Blacklists (SURBLs), which list domains advertised via spam. Spamfilters will intercept emails that mention blacklisted domains used in clickable links. The spammers can use fake sender addresses and send [...]

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