| |||||||||||||
A decline in email spam?A decline in email spam?Posted Jul 8, 2011 2:22 UTC (Fri) by tshow (subscriber, #6411)Parent article: A decline in email spam?
I've actually got scam spam via snail mail. My wife and I live in Canada, and we've received two letters from Spain, apparently with properly canceled 0.80 EUR stamps. Both letters are addressed to us personally, though it looks like whoever sent them probably harvested our name and address from a phone book.
The two letters are nearly identical, describing themselves as coming from a barrister in Spain. Apparently my distant relatives are filthy rich and dying like flies in Spain. One of them left $10M USD in chancery after a tragic death, while the other (in the second letter) had the good taste to leave $10M EUR in chancery when they met their inevitable end.
In both cases the pitch is that the barrister presents me as the legit heir, and we split the money. So, yeah, more or less your classic Nigerian email scam.
Except they mailed two of them to me with 0.80 EUR stamps. That's where it gets weird for me. Are enough people falling for this scam that the economics actually make sense through snail mail? Or is this some sort of psych experiment?
Beyond that, I thought a lot of countries had some fairly nasty laws with regards to "wire fraud" and the like. I know there's been some question as to how those laws apply to email, but the rules are pretty clear (and severe, IIRC) when it comes to physical mail.
(Log in to post comments)
A decline in email spam? Posted Jul 8, 2011 4:51 UTC (Fri) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246) [Link]
I got a Spanish Lottery scam spam through snail mail once myself, it too with proper postage. Weird.
And on a completely different topic, I never thought I'd see the phrase "rule 34" on LWN. *chuckle*
A decline in email spam? Posted Jul 8, 2011 13:34 UTC (Fri) by oak (subscriber, #2786) [Link]
> Except they mailed two of them to me with 0.80 EUR stamps. That's where it gets weird for me.
Maybe somebody's very cost-efficient & good at forging stamps? Checks on cheap 0.80 EUR ones probably aren't that rigorous (does anybody know?)...
A decline in email spam? Posted Jul 8, 2011 21:54 UTC (Fri) by blitzkrieg3 (subscriber, #57873) [Link]
You can send any canceled stamp through the post and the machines that route it will read it as "already canceled" (presumably by the first machine to process it) and if it isn't found by the letter carrier, it will be delivered as normal.
The reason people don't do this is because there isn't %100 chance of delivery, and you can land yourself in trouble if you do.
A decline in email spam? Posted Jul 8, 2011 21:59 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
>The reason people don't do this is because there isn't %100 chance of delivery, and you can land yourself in trouble if you do.
also, most people are honest and do the right thing, even then they can probably get away with stealing.
A decline in email spam? Posted Jul 14, 2011 5:12 UTC (Thu) by slashdot (guest, #22014) [Link]
It's also expensive to figure out whether they can get away with stealing or not.
A decline in email spam? Posted Jul 9, 2011 5:58 UTC (Sat) by geuder (subscriber, #62854) [Link]
Yes, I have also received snail spam from Spain at least once, maybe twice here in Finland. Yes, the address was taken from the phonebook, because my address appers in the phonebook in unique form not used anywhere else.
I have also received a lottery scam by SMS. The number shown was an Irish one, but that has to be taken with caution. If you have access to a short messages center, the sender can be written like the From: header in SMTP. I'd guess the price of a mass SMS could be somewhere around 2 - 4 Euro cents.
(Interesting enough the spam SMS did not come to my postpaid mobile subscription, which is even publicly listed and where I receive all kind of "legal" telemarketing calls. The scam message came to an unregistered and unlisted prepaid number, which I hardly ever use. But I remembered that I had used this number to get one more Google account, after they had made confirmation by phone mandatory. So has Google been hacked or did they sell my number?)
Anyway about "costly" spamming. It's all about probability. Not too many people should respond to email spam/scam these days anymore. But still it must be profitable.
Stamped snail or SMS scam must be much more credible to many people. If the fraction is high enough you end up with profit even if your "marketing" costs are higher. (Actually that shows that the senders were not very professional. There are much cheaper bulk postage rates available even in other European countries, and real stamps are known to be a quality factor by marketing professionals and postal adminstrations alike)
Anyway it seems that the fraction of responders to "high quality" scam was too small for a profit. Otherwise we would have all seen more of the nonsense and it would no longer be fun at the family dinner when such a letter is being opened.
A decline in email spam? Posted Jul 9, 2011 19:56 UTC (Sat) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] So has Google been hacked or did they sell my number? Do mobile phone providers charge you for non-deliverable SMS? The spammer could just send SMS to all the telephone numbers in a particular range, starting at, say, 0000000 and finishing at 9999999, and see which ones get through. This is being done for e-mail addresses, so why not for SMS?
A decline in email spam? Posted Jul 9, 2011 20:26 UTC (Sat) by geuder (subscriber, #62854) [Link]
Yes, SMS is store and forward. Charging happens immediately when the message is sent. They don't care what happens after that. (This has been discussed especially for premium SMS services. If the user mispells the search, order or what ever service she was trying to use, she well end up paying for service that was never fulfilled.)
We have 5 mobile subscriptions in the family. Only one "won in the lottery" Of course I cannot be 100% sure that the number came from my Google account creation, but it was definitely the closest use of this phone in relation to spam. As I wrote the subscription is very much unused. Not saying that Google themselves do it, but certainly they are interesting for spammers.
|
|||||||||||||