Joe Wein’s blog

Comments from Yokohama, Japan

Entries Tagged as '419'

Microsoft subsidizes Nigerian scammers

February 12th, 2008 · 3 Comments

A four-part series of blog postings at Artists against 419 discusses in detail the massive abuse of Microsoft’s OfficeLive (MSOL) webhosting service by Advance fee fraud scammers, which I mentioned in a previous blog post here. Currently I come across such MSOL domains at a rate of about two new ones per day.
As the Artists […]

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Tags: 419 · spam

Yahoo abuse handling improves, OfficeLive and Earthlink have their work cut out

December 10th, 2007 · 2 Comments

Nine months ago I reported about a series of child porn sites that were being illegally hosted at Yahoo’s webhosting service. At the time I was seeing about half a dozen new sites pop up every day. I am glad to report that about 4 weeks ago Yahoo finally seems to have done something to […]

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Tags: 419 · spam

Anti-Fraud sites under attack

September 7th, 2007 · 1 Comment

Several of the main sites dedicated to fighting online scams are currently inaccessible because of a “Denial of service” (DoS) attack.
Fraudwatchers.com, aa419.org, 419eater.com and occassionally thescambaiter.com have been offline. Thescambaiter.com and 419eater.com are two of the oldest sites that fight “419″ scams (named of the section in the Nigerian penal code that prohibits fraud). […]

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Tags: 419 · Computers · botnets

Botnets meet “Nigerian” spam

February 28th, 2007 · 5 Comments

Today I received an email which was a familiar scam sent from West Africa. I receive literally hundreds of them every day. What made this one different was that it carried a link to a malware site.
Any Windows user foolish enough to click the link and run the executable would get his machine infected […]

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Tags: 419 · spam