Spammers Broadcast It for FREE!

“FREE” is by far the most commonly used term in spam mails. The word free is such a striking term that any layman, without the knowledge of these tricks of the trade, can get into the trap of cloaked mails sent by the spammers.

Here are a couple of the most often used sentences in spam mails:

”¢Â  We are letting you try it for FREE, you just pay the shipping costs!
”¢Â  FREE Download without limits!
”¢Â  Get your Free Trial Now!
”¢Â  Take FREE exotic vacations!
”¢Â  Get Free trial bottle!

This barrage reminds me of the maxim “appearances can be deceiving.” This adage becomes true in a scenario in which an innocent user falls pray to these eye-catching spam mails and then regrets it later.

Coming back to the main topic of broadcasting for “free,” we are observing a trend wherein spammers abuse social networking websites quite frequently by creating fake accounts to host spam.

The most common trend these days is spammers inserting spoofed URLs associated with social networking and social bookmarking sites such as Blogspot, Yahoo Groups, and Google Groups to host porn, health, replica watches, acai power slim, and many others categories of spam on them. Thus it becomes a big challenge for these social networking sites to moderate any abusive or spammy messages on their networks.

A recent and classic example of how the bad guys (spammers) take advantage of some really cool features provided by these networking websites will leave you amazed. Have a look at the following sample, which will give you a better understanding of these types of spam mails.

 

“Get your Free Trial Now” is a hyperlink to “google.com/reader/view/user/”¦” Clicking it will redirect you to the web page, where the spammer has created a fake profile on social networking websites. The actual spam is in the form of an image that is again hyperlinked to the main spam website. Basically the spammers have abused the “sharing items” feature to their advantage and are spreading spam.

The feature-sharing items allows you to share all your reading-list contents with the public.

Why is the spammer using a different approach altogether rather than simply placing the spam URL in the mail?

It’s very easy for anti-spam filters to cut out mails with URLs that have been recently created and are hosting spam. An example to this would be URLs with .cn domains hosting meds spam most of the time.

Due to a seeming inability to filter and remove their content, spammers abuse social networking websites far more than any other free web-hosting site. We advise our customers to be cautious about such mails and refrain from clicking any URLs in them.

We’ll finish with some more typical examples of how spam looks on social networking websites.

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