Spammers now using our harvested personal names
Lately I have been seeing spam that uses my first name or nickname in the subject and message body. The majority of these spam messages are for work at home scams. The last time this happened it came from a compromised Hotmail account belonging to a friend. The email came from that Hotmail account and was composed by spambots that had taken over the account after guessing or stealing the password.
The new spam that contains my first name or nickname is not coming from Hotmail, nor is it going to a Hotmail account. This behavior was predicted a month or two ago, after hackers broke into numerous email databases and stole usernames, real names and email accounts associated with them.
I am revealing this now to protect my readers from being tricked into clicking on links contained in emails that address them by their personal or nick names. It used to be that only trusted contacts had our actual names, but, that has changed this year. No email addressing you by name can be trusted 100% until you verify that it really came from the sender it claims to be from. Furthermore, some spam addressing us by our names doesn't pretend to come from known senders. It uses your name to get you to read the contents and click on the links without second thought, as though sent by some forgotten friend or contact.
If you receive an email message that refers to anything work related, but doesn't positively come from someone you would expect to send you such a message, it is possibly a scam. Watch for keywords related to working at home, making more money, or anything involving money or work.
With so many people out of work and looking for jobs online, work at home scams are rampant. Most I have examined have a link to a fake website that looks like a television station news site. They include seeming positive reviews from happy people who supposedly used their method. However, everything on those websites is bogus. They are created from templates distributed by criminal spammers, placed on botted PCs, or hosted by spam-friendly web hosts in places like China, Romania, Russia and Serbia. You are asked to pay for materials and leads that may never arrive.
Whether you receive anything in the mail or not, your personal legal name, address and credit/debit card information will go into a database maintained by criminals who are in the money laundering business. Later on you may be contacted by members of these cyber crime organizations and be solicited for a "Money Mule" position. Money Mules are typically people who are tricked thinking they are performing a paying work at home job for a legitimate company. Many are used as a one-time conduit to process stolen funds that are deposited into their bank accounts, after which they send them on to a foreign recipient, then await the promised commission - which often never arrives.
What the Mules don't (usually) know is that the money they are processing was stolen by a Zeus or SpyEye Trojan - that was planted on a computer that was used to conduct financial transactions by innocent employees of small, medium and large size companies. Once the theft is noticed and reported to authorities, the Police follow the money, directly to the Mule used to transfer it out of the Country. Then they come for YOU!
Money Laundering is a Federal crime in the US and Canada. Money Mules are usually caught and prosecuted, then fined and sometimes imprisoned, for participating in these scams, whether knowingly or unknowingly. Don't fall for Work At Home scams, or money transfer "jobs" offered by online companies, or unsolicited email.
A good email spam filter can identify work at home and money mule scams before you are tricked into opening the email in your desktop email client. I happen to write spam filters for one of the foremost desktop spam detection applications in the World: MailWasher Pro. My custom spam filters detect most work at home and money mule come-ons and flag or auto delete them.
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