Holiday Spam and Not the Kind You Eat

My in-box has been getting hit hard lately by an onslaught of spam. I noticed that most, if not all the spam is about online deals. Spammers love the holidays and for good reason, people are always looking for great deals. The only problem is the deal you are getting is more than you bargained for. Spammers try to lure in their victims into handing over personal information so they can use it for other criminal activity to fill their own pockets. I have my spam filter set and though it catches most of the common spam, this spam looks legitimate.

Many of the embedded links go to low reliability web sites as indicated by my trusty Web of Trust Firefox add-on. The sender will mask the actual web address (URL) by using alt text as shown below.

iPod 8GB 6^th Generation – New $99.95

This particular iPod sells normally for $149 at Bestbuy and that makes this deal look suspicious. It pays to be a smart consumer!

Some of the sites will even offer free stuff if you fill out a simple form and answer a few survey questions. The problem with the form is that it asks for more than just your name and email address. They want your home address, phone number, city and state. These are just websites that harvest information and sell it to 3^rd party companies for profit.

If something looks too good to be true, than more than likely it’s a scam.

If you receive an email in which you have no idea who the sender is, just delete it.

If you are using Gmail, Yahoo or any other free email service, make sure you mark these emails as spam. I use Yahoo and they have a filter called SpamGuard. You can learn more about how to use SpamGuard by following the link below.

http://antispam.yahoo.com/spamguard