Here are a few scam-related messages we received in the inbox today. A common thread is that the scammers keep thinking creatively about lowering the recepient's guard:
VoIP Phishing Mike sent us a copy of a message that claimed to come from the City Credit Union, and asked the recipient to call a particular number because the recipient's account was temporarily suspended:
We replace the last 3 digits with XXX, just in case. According to Mike, when you call, "you get a very old style computer voice asking you to input your debit credit card number." Mike is a customer of City Credit Union. A very similar scam was reported by the Blog of Scams a few days ago--very similar text, but it referred to APL Federal Credit Union instead. For additional examples of vishing, see an earlier diary. Baiting the Victim In the next and unrelated example today's mailbag, we encounter a dying widow looking of an arms dealer, looking to make friends on the Internet:
Notice that the message implies that the sender is wealthy, and without anyone to receive inheritance when she passes away. This detail is meant to bait the recipient, who might hope to get the money after befriending Mrs. Hilary Whitney. While this message was submitted via email, a version of it was also distributed via blog spam as early as May 23, 2008. Scammers Against Scams Our last example seems to be an outreach email for helping victims of Nigerian-style scams. In reality, it is an attempt to gain the recipients' trust to defraud them. The technique is similar to the example we described in an earlier diary.
Several instances of this scam were observed on the web recently (see 1, 2), and a Google search for "Nigerian Government Reimbursement Committee" shows numerous hits that suggest fraudulent activities. -- Lenny Lenny Zeltser leads a regional security consulting team at Savvis and teaches a course on reverse-engineering malware at SANS.
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Lenny 216 Posts Aug 29th 2008 |
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Aug 29th 2008 1 decade ago |
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