Almost all of us who are regular email users now loathe the spam mail (unsolicited commercial email) that we receive. According to some organizations, as much as 81% of all email in circulation is impersonal spam, viruses, or otherwise unwanted content.

To minimize the spam mail received in my primary account, I utilize a double layer of filtering. My primary filter (Barracuda) is at the server level, and provided by my ISP. This filter traps most spam before it ever gets to my inbox, and makes the ensnared email available for personal inspection prior to deletion. It has proven highly effective, and rarely has a false-positive that blocks a legitimate email, while offering me the opportunity to delete, deliver, or whitelist (allow future emails from that source to pass unrestricted). My secondary spam filter, Mailwasher Pro (www.firetrust.com) is on my computer, and screens all of my email that was passed by the server, prior to my downloading the email to my computer. While there are several other excellent spam filters available, I have found the flexibility and efficiency of this combo to well meet my personal needs.

Rhetorically then, what is the problem with spam emails if they are so easy to filter? The answer is that spam email is still heavily laden with scams intended to separate the victim from his hard earned money at the least, and may possibly also be used to commit the common crime of identity theft.

My dual layer of spam filters catches about 100 such suspicious emails daily, and what follows is a representative selection of some of the scam emails that were detected.

One had my real full name in the “To:” line, as well as in the subject line, along with the phrase “Your account 589727167TG”. Normally such an obvious scam would be deleted without ever being opened by me, but for the purposes of this column, I will acquiesce. This scam email informs me that I qualify for a $327,000 mortgage, with a monthly payment of only $617 per month. The link in the email opens an attractive website offering first and second mortgages as well below current market rates. The rates are so attractive that they could easily snare victims in entering their personal information, social security number, credit references, credit card numbers with their security codes and expiration dates, bank account information including the routing number from the bottom of a check, and other sensitive information. The major problem is that this information is being provided on an insecure website. A quick forensic check on the website indicates that it is actually located in Albania! Now, what would someone in Albania do with all of my personal and financial information? Would they make me a home loan at below market rates or steal my identity? Some recent studies indicate that 22% of people who receive these scam emails open them, and up to 2% actually enter information on the scam website, one of the reasons why identity theft victimizes about 10 million adults in the U.S. annually.

Some spam filters utilize a dictionary of suspicious terms to identify potential spam emails. In order to defeat this common filtering method, many spammers intentionally misspell the wording in the subject line and in the body of the spam. One such spam trapped in today’s filter is for credit repair, another well documented scam. This one is obvious because of the mixing of numerals with similar letters, in a sometimes successful attempt to defeat inferior spam filters. Spammers substitute the numeral “1 (one)” for lower case “l (L)”, “0 (zero)” for the letter “O (oh)”, and other intentional misspellings. This spam had the subject, (sic) “bi11s getting out of contro1” with a representative line in the body “Combine your bi11s into 0NE 10W month1y payment”. Note the substitution of the numerals “1” and “0” for the letters “l” and “O”. The link in the email leads to a website which also solicits personal information, and is located in the Caribbean.

Another scam email type has caught the attention of federal and state securities regulators who would like to shut them down, but often lack jurisdiction because they are typically coming from Russia, Eastern Europe, and China. These scams engage in the practice of “touting trash” by claiming to give hot stock tips, most often with thinly traded penny stocks. The first one caught in my filter today is from email address djgkwas@all.at, which is likely a false email address. It is touting a penny stock currently trading for 4 cents, and includes a well worded statement that this stock is poised to jump to $10! The way this scam works is that the scammer purchases a large block of some thinly traded, low capitalization stock, and then spams millions of potential “investors”, hoping that they will bite and purchase the stock. A small percentage (research says 4%) will read the email, and a few will purchase this security based on the wild statements in the spam email. As the purchasers bid the price of the stock up, the scammer sells into the increase, leaving the new investors holding near-worthless paper, while the spammer reaps a windfall profit. This is the same “get rich quick” mentality where greed overcomes common sense, and makes countless victims of this and other similar scams. It should also be noted that there is a “remove me” link at the bottom of this email which claims to connect to tstock-no-more.com, but instead really connects to a Canadian site “iellmewhy.com” a blank site registered to a false hotmail account, with the phone number “555-555-5555”.

If we collectively would not be victimized by the human frailty “greed over common sense”, and refuse to fall for these scams, we would all be better off. This also explains why it is not just the number of spams received (today my primary filter trapped 107), but the risks associated with dealing with unscrupulous spammers.

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