With blogging comes the need to have some public email address. This inevitable attracts unsolicited stuffs – between fifty and two hundred mails per day in my case.
The usual sender is some doctor that promisses to enlarge one of my body parts or the son of a dead Nigerian government official who needs my help to transfer a million bucks to my bank account. Most of such mails get filtered automatically, but here is an extrodinary one that escaped the process. Some spammer is posing as a law firm:
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That email was send from some "temp3" account with the subject "URGENT LEGAL LETTER".
I use the Advice on SPAM issued by the security center of CERN in Switzerland. The CERN folks invented the World Wide Web so they know a bit or two about this. They say (original emphasis):
SPAM and virus emails can be disguised to trick you into reading the email and/or performing an action. Here are examples of some techniques to help you recognise them:
- fake email addresses: [..] Fake addresses may be used to send viruses. If the email looks suspicious then delete it and do not open the attachments.
- enticing subjects: the email subject uses words to make you curious, believe the email is important, or specific to you, so that you will read it. [..] If there are attachments then they probably contain viruses. Delete the email and do not open the attachments.
Ok – "temp3" certainly looks like a fake address to me and the "URGENT LEGAL LETTER" screaming all-caps-subject-line is an obvious trap.
The first text line of the email is asking for a response. If one responds to spammers, they have confirmed that the email address they spamed is valid and continue to spam it. This mail even says so: "to ensure correspondence is automatically saved to our Electronic Document Management System". Ha – I will certainly NOT respond to this one.
Then the message: "see the attached urgent legal letter". Wow – they nearly got me there, didn’t they. Indeed there is a 380 kilobyte attachment. A typed text page contains some 2,000 letters or 2 kilobytes. Either that attachment is a 160 page legal brief or something else. A virus, a worm, some illegal kiddie-porn picture? I will never know. As CERN recommends:
Viruses are often hidden inside attachments, so do not open attachments in unsolicited email.
Okay – I swear I’ll NOT open that attachment.
There is a signature: My "faithfully schillings" and another one: "temp3@schillings.co.uk".
Schillings? Why not Dollars or Pounds? I mean schillings sounds cheap, really cheap, like twelve pence or so. How can a few schillings protect reputations and brands?
Another part of that mail. Maybe you can make some sense out of this.
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See the address? "Soho" in the UK – isn’t that some London sex district? And just behind that an embedded weblink. Wonder where that one would lead to – some backroom of a red light bar in Soho?
CERN again:
- click on a web site: if you click you could be downloading a virus. This can also be a technique to validate your email address and increase your chances of receiving more unwanted emails. Be cautious of selecting web links included in SPAM mail.
Okay – I didn’t go to that site and you shouldn’t either.
Does the next line reveal something about the sender? "Regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority"
If I correctly remember my English lessons a solicitor is someone that ‘seeks trade or contributions’. So what is the "Solicitors Regulation Authority", a ‘United Spammers Association’? Thanks, I have no intend to contribute.
Now follow some lines of pseudo legaleeze gibberish. None of that makes sense to me, but then I neither know much English nor about legal issues. But one bit I wonder about. It says ‘something’ "is prohibited and may be unlawful."
If something is unlawful, it is prohibited. Right? Now if something is NOT unlawful, how can that be prohibited? I mean the sender is pretening to send some legal stuff and doesn’t know if something is prohibited or is unlawful or is not? "May be"?
Beats me, but then again – it’s just spam and now it went down the eternal bit bucket. No use to clog my hard drive with such …