Life as I find it

I got this email:

Dear Administrator,

We inform you that your account is about to expire. It is strongly recommended to update it immediately. Update form is located here. However, failure to confirm your records may result in account suspension.

Confidential: Please be advised that the information contained in this email message, including all attached documents or files, is privileged and confidential and is intended only for the use of the individual or individuals addressed. Any other use, dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. This is the automated message. Please don’t reply. You tell me.

Talk of spam….. i don’t even know if I need to talk about this, except that it is sad that in this online world, it is so easy to defraus (or attempt to do so).

I had never heard of the company that sent me the email, forget buying something that needs updated subscriptions. Obviously a case of phishing or some get-rich-quick-illegally kind of thing.

I researched this message to see what experiences others had had and came across:

The write of this blog, some Ritesh Roshan has published it on his blog!!!

The description of this blog says:

“THIS BLOG IS CREATED TO EXPRESS THE FEELING & CURRENT RESEARCHES OF
SCIENCES. THESE EXPRESSION LEADS IN THE SPREAD OF KNOWLEDGE ABOUT
SCIENCE. THESE KNOWLEDGES HELP IN DIFERENT SCIENTIFIC DISCUSSION.
FURTHER, PRAYING FOR EVERY PERSONS WHO CLICK FOR MY PERSONAL BLOG AND
THOSE WHO DIDN’T CLICKED THIS FOR ANY REASON. YOUR’S FRIEND RITESH
ROSHAN”

Some exploration led me to:

For a moment, I thought that this was some student from Patna running a scam. Then I thought it must be some student who had been convinced to pass on a scam as a genuine message.

Then I looked at all the posts in the blog. The posts list looks like my spam box. All sex spam and scam. Yet, the description didn’t sound spammy.

Now I am wondering what happens when a spammer gers someones “email to blog” ID and runs it through a regular spam bot without the benifit of spam filters and stuff a normal email account would have.

And there are other people like this. Lazy to hunt for links at the moment, but there are plenty who create and abandon blogs and get careless with stuff like logins and blogging email IDs

For me, this post highlights two major concerns:

• What does it do to a person’s reputation if a spammer is running sex and scams in his name on his blog and what can be done to prevent it
• How are these scams still operating in a world of computerized banking and tracking of fraud?

Might be worthwhile making a preventative measures kind of post about this later.