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While I was going through my personal email last night, what turned out to be a spam email struck my eyes. Coincidently, it contained some references to something I’ve been researching recently. Facebook.

First thing that came to my mind is that I was targeted because I have a .edu address, and Facebook was originally used solely by students. After spending a couple of minutes inspecting that spam, it was obvious that the spammer didn’t utilise Facebook in any technical manner but rather as a pure social-engineering trick to get people to read that spam.
Natalie made her first appearance in that spam asking me to add her contact to my MSN Messenger account, because she thought that I was “hot” (yeah, right!). In a successful scenario, the recipient would have thought that “Natalie” has checked their profiles in Facebook and seen their main photo.

So, I created a new account to see where this spam is going to lead me. Natalie turned to be an MSN bot
with an “appealing” avatar. The bot itself wasn’t engaging itself in any sort of conversation rather than trying to get people “tempted” to step to the next stage. Natalie-the-bot used a couple of tricks to imitate real human conversational behavior. Every time it sent me a lengthy message, it didn’t send it in one burst. First, I was shown the message that Natalie was writing something to me in order to give me the impression (and keep me on my toes) that a human was writing. Second, it sent me a .JPG attachment of a larger version of the avatar it used (which never arrived!). It was never meant to be delivered anyway!

By the end of the “conversation” this spam was actually trying to get people to submit their credit card details in exchange for some live webcam shows by the infamous Natalie. Allegedly, there was a real Natalie which was causing all this noise. I hope that nobody has fallen for this or similar tricks.
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I wish somone would stop these cretins from trying to scam people out of their information..
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