kasia in a nutshell: Clever scammers

« Lord of the Rings movies and maturing of the female species | Main | This may have been my last one ever »

Clever scammers

I've received an e-mail today claiming to be from ebay and requesting confirmation of information.. That's nothing new, of course.. we've all seen these scam email soliciting information.. The clever part of this one was that the entire e-mail content was just an image, which was of course a link..

Looks quite real, doesn't it? I bet my mom would have fallen for it.. If she used ebay.. I've tried to explain to her why html in email is bad, but she doens't get it, sigh.

Posted by kasia on October 2, 2003 08:41 PM | Permalink

TrackBack

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Clever scammers:

» re: clever scammers from atog
looks like i'm not the only one who received that ebay-thingy-mail :) i never was an ebay-user so it was quite obvious that it was a scam... what i didn't know is that you could report it to ebay, so [Read More]

Comments

Indeed - you can forward the message to spoof@ebay.com... I've sent two actually. One of the little spores sent it to an email address that doesn't HAVE an email account on it... oops.

Posted by: Randy | October 2, 2003 09:26 PM

Araising your mom's awareness:
You might tell her that HTML is designed for easy and immediate interaction (that's why spammers love it). So if she wants to avoid to interact with spammers she should not use it.

But you most probably tried that already ... double-sigh.

Posted by: Wolfgang Flamme | October 2, 2003 09:35 PM

I just don't buy that html in email is bad. Client-side scripting, yes. Auto-executing executables, yes. But decrying plain ole html seem rather a luddite idea. It may make it easier for people to shoot themselves in the foot, but not much more than it would be otherwise. Scammers have been separating fools from their money for a long-time. I don't believe HTML is a critical enabler of that.

Posted by: George Schlossnagle | October 2, 2003 09:49 PM

That's just completely nasty. Working as hard as I do it just sickens me to see such lowlife scum mass stealing from people.

Posted by: Peter | October 2, 2003 10:02 PM

I got one too - sent it in already.

I will admit the bold gave it away for me, before the mouse moved over the image.

Posted by: Chris | October 3, 2003 02:11 AM

If you don't want to view HTML e-mails in Outlook Express:

Tools menu > Options > Read > tick 'Read all messages in plain text'.

Then if you want a view an e-mail in HTML, click 'forward'.

Posted by: Baba | October 3, 2003 01:21 PM

That's actually a lot more inventive than the typical eBay scam "@" emails.

Posted by: Stewart Vardaman | October 3, 2003 05:05 PM