Watch out for work at home email scams
October 27, 2013
It's Monday morning and a quick check of my MailWasher Pro recycle bin revealed a slew of work at home scams, with links to websites having .EU extensions. EU represents European domain names. Domain names I have seen are variations of IWillTeachYouToBeRich{3 or 4 characters}.eu/
Many of these domains have already been suspended due to reports from SpamCop, and other spam reporting agencies. The one that is still active at this moment (hosted in China at 111.121.193.200) contains a typical work at home scam promotion, using tons of JavaScript to display a message containing your approximate location. This is known as Geo-targeting. If you live in Chicago, the scam message will say that so and so, a work at home mom, made $8,000 in one month using this program. The copy mentions that you will be working with companies worth over 100 billion dollars.
The landing page is bobby trapped with popup windows to try to prevent you from leaving the site, unless you agree to sign up, or completely close your browser. The payload is a link to purchase "Home Income Kit." This is a money mule scam run by professional con men. People who buy these useless info packs are then solicited to become "mules" in a money laundering or stolen goods reshipper racket.
Sidenote: I write custom spam filters for MailWasher Pro. My filters detect and auto-delete such scams and many others.
Note, all of these work at home websites are blocked by Trend Micro Internet Security programs, which I use and recommend. Even if you knowingly try to visit these pages, Trend's browser protection module blocks them with this unmistakeable notice: "Trend Micro has confirmed that this website can transmit malicious software or has been involved in online scams or fraud."
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