Unethical Online Loan Email Spam

This is the perfect time of year for criminals to launch their devious scams. I recently received this email spam, claiming to offer unsecured loans, but the links in the email go to a shopping site instead. The site is rated dangerous by WOT (Web of Trust) and has low reliability.

If you click on any of the links in the email, you will be taken to a site www.smarter.com. The site’s copyright in the page footer displays:

The domain didn’t exist until January 2009

Re: http://whois.domaintools.com/smarter.com

If a site cannot be honest about the “little things”, how could you trust it for any other information?

According to jsnric31 at mywot.com – Instead of directing you to anything remotely related to the original subject, it sends you off to some bogus, stripped down, lackluster site advertising a bunch of stuff you’re not interested in.

The site appears on a list of malicious websites.

Example Email

Personal unsecured loans

From: Unsecured Loan <mirage@hand2fistchange.com>
To: recipient@yahoo.com

Never click on any links in an email that you are not familiar with the sender.

3 Comments

Giedrius Majauskas on December 23, 2010 at 10:51 am

Frank: it might be a case of temporally expired domain. If domain record expires, and later is repurchased, I think it registration time gets reset.
Why I think this is the case? Smarter is good domain name, and it is hard to find such domain in 2009.
Also, the evidence in http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://smarter.com
confirms my theory.
Now about actual spam.
Many of spammy emails link to proxy sites to prevent users blaming the actual site siting behind each spam. Sometime proxy sites might be user record/articles in legitimate sites. Don’t know if this is the case.

Donna on January 4, 2011 at 1:06 pm

Now , the best thing that you can do is to ignore any of those emails, whenever it is a spam or not, money is really important .

Frank Jovine on January 4, 2011 at 1:09 pm

Nice spam comment – reported to three agencies. Better luck next time!

If you are not applying for any cash loan then don’t make yourself busy by knowing the behind story about it.

Giedrius Majauskas on December 23, 2010 at 10:51 am

Frank: it might be a case of temporally expired domain. If domain record expires, and later is repurchased, I think it registration time gets reset.
Why I think this is the case? Smarter is good domain name, and it is hard to find such domain in 2009.
Also, the evidence in http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://smarter.com
confirms my theory.
Now about actual spam.
Many of spammy emails link to proxy sites to prevent users blaming the actual site siting behind each spam. Sometime proxy sites might be user record/articles in legitimate sites. Don’t know if this is the case.
Donna on January 4, 2011 at 1:06 pm

Now , the best thing that you can do is to ignore any of those emails, whenever it is a spam or not, money is really important .
- Frank Jovine on January 4, 2011 at 1:09 pm
  
  Nice spam comment – reported to three agencies. Better luck next time!
  
  If you are not applying for any cash loan then don’t make yourself busy by knowing the behind story about it.