Spammers lack imagination in July

Spammers appear to have taken their summer vacation in July, if the junk mail that evaded my gauntlet of garbage filters is any indication of their activities during the period. They stuck to shopworn and even hoary pitches with little in the way of inventiveness.

One vein that was worked extensively prior to July faked support messages from my Internet Service Provider. It seems my ISP wised up to these attacks and only a pair managed to make it to my inbox in July. One was a typical inept attempt to obtain my user ID and password. If the fact that the sender of the message spelled user incorrectly wasn’t enough of a tip off, the “reply to” address to an AOL account sealed the deal. The other lame pitch had a security angle. “This message is from Your Service provider kindly send your Login information because we noticed your account is being accessed from three different location,” it said. I don’t know about your service provider, but mine doesn’t refer to itself as “Your Service Provider.” It also knows a thing or two about punctuating sentences and when to use plural nouns.

One of the oddest messages landing in my inbox had a subject line in an alphabet I didn’t recognize, but had an English message beckoning me to go to kasate.com for a sealed lead acid automatic battery charger.

Speaking of battery recharging, by far the most effective spam penetrating my defenses dealt with drugs. The good old-fashioned “From Canada to you” subject line butchered in some fashion–Fro’m %Cana#da to y’ou, for example, or From| “+Canada to yo%u”–still seems to be working. However, rather than hawking male performance drugs, these junk emails simply offer cheap meds. Given that pharmaceutical spam has been a rising star in the spam universe, it shouldn’t be surprising that some of it makes it through mail sieves. The category has grown to 85 percent of all spam on the Internet from 65.5 percent last year. What is surprising to me, though, is how little of it reaches my inbox.

I’m also surprised as to how anyone could fall for the pitches in these messages. It’s obvious that the authors of this sputum aren’t on the level. Why else would they pepper their ploys with so many oddball characters to foil filters looking for words that flag messages as spam, words like Canadian, meds and money. I mean, who in their right mind responds to “Meds% are onsale &al(l ^week” or “Canad&ian m”eds ]are cheaper/Check our meds/ line up and __choose w|hats best.”

In addition to the profuse use of oddball characters in words, some passages are tacked on to the bottom of the messages. The idea behind that tactic is to make the junk look like a real email message to automated spam fighting systems which have limited intelligence. Those passages used to be true nonsense, meaningless collections of letters and words. In more recent times, though, the passages are snatched from literary works. In the batch of junk that last month survived my defenses, the most popular authors for the passages were Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, noted for his immortal detective Sherlock Holmes, and Sun Tzu, who penned the classic treatise The Art of War. Other authors cadged by the spammers were Lewis Carroll (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland), H.G. Wells (The Invisible Man), A. E. Burgett (The Door of Heaven) and J.K. Huysmans (Là-Bas).

It seems no month of spam would be complete without a Nigerian scam sneaking through the cracks. Although this scam dates back to the 20th century, spammers apparently never tire of recycling it. In the version of the bunkum that ended up in my inbox, the spammer claims to be a 24-year-old Senegal woman who is an heiress to $7 million. She is writing to me “with due respect and heartful of tears since we have not known or meet ourselves previously” and trusts me with her money because “I have gone through a profile that speaks good of you.” In exchange for helping her transfer her inheritance from a “financier company” to her, she’ll give me 30 percent of the seven million. Further details about the transaction will be conveyed to me once she sees a copy of my passport, home address and telephone numbers. Actually, as Nigerian schemes go, this is a mild one. Usually, they ask for some cash upfront.