The Work at Home Scam Blog

Email Scams Getting More and More Clever

Firstly, let me apologize for not posting anything in ages. I have finally gotten my home business going full-time, but not without some major obstacles in the way. I’ve been a very busy lady and just haven’t had the time to devote to exposing scams. Hopefully that will change soon.

Now, on to business. I’ve been getting some scam emails that are quite clever lately, and I thought it would be worthwhile to post some of them here even though most of them are not business-related. Scammers and spammers often get email addresses from websites, and those who are in business online are frequent targets. Here are some of the types of scam emails I’ve been receiving, in no particular order.

• Scare Tactics - I got one today that just took the cake, and it is what prompted me to write this. The subject line said, “dude, what if your wife finds this?” and the body read “OMG, what are you doing man. This video of you is all over the net. check it out yourself”, followed by what read as a YouTube link. But when mousing over the link, it was revealed that it went to a different website, with an IP instead of a www address.

  Now, I am not a man and I don’t have a wife. But if I were, this just might have scared me into looking. Even if I knew I had done nothing wrong, with some creative editing pictures and videos can be made to look like something they’re not. Clever.

• eCards - I’ve been getting a lot of notifications that someone has sent me an ecard. The casual observer could easily mistake these for being legit, but there are some red flags to look for. First of all, instead of including the sender’s name, they usually say a friend, neighbor, family member, or coworker has sent you a greeting. And while the link says that it goes to a major ecard site such as Blue Mountain or Hallmark, a mouseover will tell you that it does not.

• Nonsense Words for Subjects - This tactic is used to get around spam filters, and in my case it has been working quite well. Spam filters are getting smarter about those emails that use unrelated, rambling subject lines. So spammers have begun to use one word that isn’t really a word, such as “suntouryl” or “pafhinjat” as a subject.

These types of emails, including the ones that look like spam, often have links that end up leading to a malicious website. By clicking on them, you expose yourself to the risk of getting a Trojan horse, virus, or other bad stuff on your computer. If you get anything like these, just delete it. And if you don’t have a virus scanner that scans email messages and their attachments as they come in, get AVG for free. It’s the one I use, and it does a great job. Just remember that even the best email scanner won’t scan the websites that an email links to.