Spammers never cease to amaze me with their ingenuity. Take a look at this one that recently showed up in my spam folder on Gmail. In yellow, there's Google's explanation of why this was trapped as spam and in red, Google's instructions on how to visit the links. Wait, what?
That's correct, the very official looking red bar that mirrors the style of the real, yellow one, is fake and is part of the email. The spammers were so sure their message would be caught, they helpfully included instructions for the unwary to circumvent the protective system. Clever.... The lesson here? Trust no one.
Do you have any examples of clever spam? Care to share a story of a friend or colleague who fell for one of these ruses?
This is a good one Paul. Most of the spam appearing in my junk inbox these days appears quite primitive by comparison and it's an easy "tell". I think we can safely expect to see more clever use of HTML, to the point where it's almost indistinguishable from the "real" sender. I am starting to see spoofed LinkedIn invites that are close to the real thing. Banking newsletters may be next up. Thanks for sharing this.
ReplyDeleteExactly right, Ken. The yOU have W0N 5,000,0000 doLLars from BAnk of niGERIA are pretty easy to spot, but more and more, I have to look twice or thrice to tell if they're fake.
ReplyDeleteI'm actually quite impressed that Gmail manages to tag 99%+ of them correctly, but I'm sure that's a function of it examining the code, versus my poor old eyeballs looking at the displayed text.