MagicalTux in Japan

Geekness brought me to Japan!

Posts Tagged Spam

EU Business Register: “We will f*** you, you signed for it!”

May 10

Posted by MagicalTux in IRL | No Comments

I already saw this spam a lot of times, but this time I decided to look a bit more into it. Some “Spanish” company (with its domain registered with a Chinese domain provider and a site hosted in Romania) is sending “update forms” for people to fill, sign and send back. They make the payment part non-obvious by stating in bold “updating is free of charge”, but in the small print, you’ll see that “by signing you subscribe for 3 years”, “subscription is automatically renewed every year” and “it costs 995€/year”.

So, if you are dumb enough to just look at the document, fill and sign (hey, it’s free), you’ll receive a nice invoice soon after (hey nice, you signed to pay 995€/year, we got your acceptance here!).

I’m not a lawyer, however I guess they can’t legally do anything as the document is misleading, sent as spam and does not clearly state the company handling it (neither do their website), so if you signed it, you are most likely safe not paying them (it should be possible to sue them for misleading offer or something in front of an EU court, but most likely not in Spain anyway).

In the meantime you can browse http://www.eubusinessregister.com/ and laugh at those who were dumb enough to sign and get their company inserted in there for 995€/year.

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Nigeria Spam 419 – A new pattern

Feb 10

Posted by MagicalTux in Geek Attitude | 2 Comments

Today I was surprised to receive a new kind of african spam I never saw before. It seems “they” noticed their usual pattern is too impossible (hidden money of an african country, I will give it to you because I don’t know who you are), so they finally got innovative.

Today the spam I got was different, but is indeed a spam, and based on the origin (tracked from the mail’s “received” headers, strangly I reached Nigeria), I believe responding to this email will get me involved in something like “He finally paid but the money is blocked in Nigeria and I’m blocked in XXX, please go there and get it for me young man, I will give you half of it”. Anyway here we go:

Dear Counsel,

My name is Clara Jong and I am a contacting your firm in regards to a
divorce settlement with my ex husband (Paul Lee Jong) who resides in
your jurisdiction. I am currently on assignment in Japan.

We had an out of court agreement (Collaborative Law Agreement) for him
to pay $448,450.00 plus legal fees in 2008, but to date he has only
paid me $44,000.

I am hereby seeking your firm’s to assistance in collecting the
balance which was agreed upon when we got in

See, quite original isn’t it. So everything needed is in there. High amount of money, a (young?) damselle blocked in an exotic country (Japan in this case, which is not quite exotic for me), and a problem with a husband. Headers are revealing the sender’s IP on a network managed by:

org-name:       MTN Nigeria
org-type:       LIR
country:        NG

I believe this is rather obvious and leaves no place for doubt. Welcome to new Spam 419, more subtle and likely to get more people involved with this scam which has been known to strip people of their money for years. I guess we’ll soon see the same pattern emerge from ex-USSR as they have been working closely (copying?) with nigerians.

Anyway be careful and never respond to those.

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Mailing: why double-optin should be the only allowed solution

Jan 19

Posted by MagicalTux in Geek Attitude | No Comments

Sending mailing to your customers and/or visitors is often an important way to bring additionnal revenues for your company. Regulary sending emails (between one week and one month between each batch) is important so people don’t forget about you and know about your latest offers. Add some discounts and stuff in the mail to ensure people will have a good reason to read them, and you’re done.

Now the question is “who should receive your mailing”. People usually thing it’s OK to just buy an email address database and send them ads everyday to let them know about you, and your offers they all really need. This is most likely going to result into your company name becoming a keyword to detect spam, which is probably not what you are expecting.
Even if you let them a choice to “opt out” from your mailing, most people will not optout in fear this will just reveal their email is valid and read, and trigger more spam. So your list will be full of people who will not opt out, but instead click “report as spam” button. This is most likely not what you want.

Now, you know you can only send mailings to people who have subscribed of their own will on your website. “Their own will” cannot be verified simply. As far as I am concerned, there are two solutions. For a visitor you have to send an email notifying him he asked to subscribe to your list, and that he must click some link to actually receive it. Including a link to privacy policies can be a good idea too.
Next comes real customers, people who have actually bought on your site and asked to receive your mailing (not with a pre-accepted subscription). For them, as they are more likely to trust your “optout” link, you can probably skip the double optin step.

Don’t forget that you also need to send mails from times to times. One full month without mail is a no-go, as customers will have forgotten about you and their subscriptions, and will immediatly suspect spam.

Sending mailings is an important communication job, and you need to have news and stuff to put in your mailing. Make it interesting for your subscribers, and send mailing regulary (every two weeks sounds like a good idea). If you can’t include a “new cool products” part, try to include news from other activies from your company or special offers. Sending the same newsletter everytime is a no-go.

Anyway remember that spam (any unwanted email, even if it’s unwanted because the subscriber forgot he was subscribed) is not good for your subscribers, not good for your image, and not good for Internet as a whole.

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NoSpam – Getting rid of email spam when registering to suspicious websites

Dec 27

Posted by MagicalTux in Geek Attitude, News, Tibanne | No Comments

Ever wanted to avoid receiving a mountain of spam when registering on a website you don’t know? NoSpam.st is made for you.

The basic idea is simple: you tell NoSpam.st your email, and you get a temporary email from us. You can then use this email on the website you don’t trust. If you indeed get subscribed to many spam lists, it will be with the nospam.st email, which will be automatically disabled when the time comes. Once disabled, any email attempt to this address will be refused.

I am also preparing a nice feature for webmasters: the ability to make a mailto link on your site via NoSpam.st: you login on NoSpam.st, enter your email address, the expiration time you wish (default would be 4 hours) and get a snippet of javascript you can include on your website. Each time someone sees the page, a different email address will be generated. A normal user will usually send an email within the next minutes if he really want to contact you about your site, and not spam you for the next years.
With this system you might get some spam if spammers are fast enough (usually spam is sent a few days/weeks/months after email address has been crawled), but in this case you’ll get informations about the crawl (ip and date) in the email headers, and anyway you won’t get much spam as the email will soon be disabled.

Anyway a lot can be do to fight email spam. Also as soon as spammers see that emails @nospam.st are soon blocked, they might even consider automatically removing @nospam.st emails from their lists (we can dream).

By the way if you have nice spam-related domain names you don’t use, you can give them to us and we’ll make them available for email addresses.

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