Email spam and scam roundup for the week ending July 14, 2013
July 14, 2013
This past week has seen a major increase in the amount of email spam for weight loss herbals, all of which are promoting a possibly dangerous and expensive green coffee bean extract.
I investigated this so-called miracle diet herb and ended up on WebMD. There, real users posted their findings, which are diabolically opposed to the rosy picture painted by the affiliate web pages promoting this junk. A lot of people taking green coffee bean extract got sick from it. Almost no one lost weight, except from having cramps, diarrhea, or vomiting, which stopped when they stopped taking the capsules. These are not a miracle weight loss solution. They are mostly a ripoff. Anybody buying this stuff as a result of a spam email will be enriching the spammers who are paid affiliates in the underground pharmaceuticals trade. If you must try this green coffee shit, you can buy it super cheap from your local Walmart (less than half the price of the spamvertised bottles). Then return it when it makes you sick.
The next busiest category of spam is sent from the former Soviet Union, where miscreants are running an ongoing penny stock pump and dump scam. They have succeeded in running the last stock they pumped, HAIR, into the ground. They are just now launching a different scam campaign pumping, then dumping another penny stock, trading as NOST, which will be run into the ground as well. A lot of suckers are taken in by these pump and dump scams and most lose all of the money they invested. Please don't fall for a pump and dump scam! The odds are stacked against you.
The third most seen category of spam last week was Nigerian 419 scams, offering huge money for processing fees. Those fees have been known to wipe out the fortunes of many greedy people who fall for this ages old con game. A fool and his money soon will part.
The fourth category I intercepted were malware attachment scams, which arrived in the form of a spoofed delivery failure form, an invoice or bill, a BBB complaint, a spoofed Facebook notification, etc. The filesize of most of the malicious attachments averaged about 137 kilobytes, all in the format of zipfiles. You need to be cautious about opening unexpected attachments and you must use an up-to-date anti-malware program to monitor every file downloaded, opened, or run, just in case.
Last, there were just a couple of Russian dating scam messages.
Finally, I hope that this information helps somebody hold onto their money, or health, which would otherwise be taken by cybercriminals and spammers, all of whom could care less about you or your well-being.
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