Question

Topic: E-Marketing

Using Khe Profile For Spamming

Posted by Mushfique Manzoor on 7/12/2006 at 8:42 AM ET 25 Points
My colleagues

I have been part of this community since 2003 and have my profile along with my email address in the profile page.

on 12th July, i have received an email from one Pauly Jaja referring that s/he got my email address from "Marketingprofs" stating that s/he wants to transfer a handsome amount of money s/he inherited from her/his father. This is a classical example of "SPAMMING" as i receive a few similar emails everyday.

the most alarming thing is my profile of Marketingprofs.com is being used for spamming by taking my email address from the site. the email is pasted below for you all.

the possibility is someone must have accessed our KHE webpage and took the email address from the profiles. Even then, can KHE take some measure to protect its members from being spammed???

____________________________________________

From: Mr Paully Jaja.
Avenue 5 Lot 172 Cocody
Quarters Abidjan Cote d' Ivoire
Wes Africa.
Tel:+225 07020381.
Please reply me through my private email: paullyjaja12@yahoo.fr


I am writing this letter with due respect and heartful of tears since we have not known or met ourselves previously.

I am asking for your assistance after I have gone through a profile in your site www.marketingprofs.com I will be so glad if you can allow and lead me to the right channel towards my predicament and also need your assistance to my situation now.

I will make my proposal well known if I am given the opportunity. I would like to use this opportunity to introduce myself to you.
I am Mr Paully Jaja, Am 22years old young man and I know that this proposal might be a surprise to you but do consider it as an emergency.

In nutshel, My (late) father Mr Edward Mohab Jaja was a very wealthy gold and cocoa merchant who based in Accra and Abidjan respectively. But he
was killed along side with my mother during last year's Rebel attack and all his investment and properties was totally destroyed.

However, after their death I managed to escape with a very important document (DEPOSIT CERTIFICATE (US$8.5m) Eight million Five hundred
thousand U.S Dollars deposited by my late father in the bank
which i am the next of kin.

Meanwhile,i am saddled with the problem of securing a trust worthy foreign personality to help me transfer the money over to his country and into his
possession pending my arrival to meet with him.

Furthermore,you can contact the bank for confirmation and i will issue a letter of authorization on your name,that will enable the bank to deal with you on my behalf.

I am giving you this offers as mentioned with every confidence on your acceptance to assist me or take me as your child and manage the
money. I am inclined to offer you 15% of the total sum as a mode of compensation for your effort after the successful transferring of these fund to your nominated account overseas

Conclusively,i wish you send me a reply immediately as soon as you receive this proposal.
please write me back with this email
address ( paullyjaja12@yahoo.fr) Thanks for your understanding
Until then,
I remain with the best regards

Paully Jaja.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by darcy.moen on 7/12/2006 at 9:07 AM Member
    This is why I use a disposable email address. Thankfully, I own my own email server and can make all the email addresses I need, and can change at any time. I simply update my profile with my new email address.

    Marketingprofs does offer the choice of hiding my email address so it is hidden from automatic email address harvesters spammers use.

    Perhaps Marketingprofs could add a process called CAPTCHA to the online email form, forcing spammers to manually type in a special code to the email form before it is sent through the website to each of us. This will sloe down a determined spammer, but it won't stop them.

    There is only so much one can do to protect oneself from spammers. There is no 100 percent foolproof way to stop these blunderers from spamming. I report all spammers to their ISP, as well as report spammers to www.spamcop.com. I also use spamassassin on my server to filter spam, and spaminspector on my email box. Spaminspector allows me to construct my very own spam filter, and can add email addresses, subject lines, IP addresses, domain names to my spam filter and cuts spam dramatically. Even with all this protection, the occasional message gets through.

    So Pauly Jaja, best of luck with your pathetic life, you just made my filter. Moving on....

    Darcy Moen
    Customer Loyalty Network
  • Posted on 7/12/2006 at 9:34 AM Member
    think moen's suggestion of CAPTHCHA would do.that particular spam is common with west african countries and they use these various versions of similar stories most of them are found on
    www.crimes-of-persuasion.com .
    think its upto all of the community members to react to thus cause Manzoor could survive the spam this time and anybody can be a victim next time
  • Posted by Frank Hurtte on 7/12/2006 at 10:19 AM Member
    The unfortunate part of these West African Scams is they are done by hand. It is my understanding this is a cottage industry involving litterally thousands of people putting the United Nations supplied surplus computers to work harvesting bank account numbers from western countries.
    I collect these scams as a hobby. See my posting in Just for Fun
  • Posted by Carl Crawford on 7/12/2006 at 11:11 AM Member
    I got one too. No matter it can rest with the other 1000 spams a get a day.
  • Posted by michael on 7/12/2006 at 11:42 AM Member
    Got the same one today. They're too easy to spot to even worry about. To me, they're just like the junk mail I still get by the truckload. Just pitch 'em.

    Michael
  • Posted by Valerie Witt on 7/12/2006 at 11:48 AM Moderator
    Hi guys. Vevolution emailed me a different spammer's message yesterday. Aaron (our trusty programmer) already had some safeguards in place to protect email addresses on our KHE profile pages. But he implemented some new protections yesterday. I'll ask him to post a quick update.

    Val
  • Posted by Peter (henna gaijin) on 7/12/2006 at 12:22 PM Accepted
    I think Darcy's suggestions should remove most of the spam that may come from this site. Taking her suggestions with my additions, specifically:

    - listing your email as hidden in your MP profile

    - you can list your email address as part of your profile in the open written part, not in the email field), but use the word 'AT' instead of the '@' sign to reduce the chance of a bot from capturing the address. e.g. mushfique26 AT yahoo.com

    - use a disposable email address - If you don't have your own domain with unlimited emails, gmail is a good option as they allow you to forward all messages to another address (so you still read the emails in your current address). Once you see spam start coming to that address, you change it.

    - As said, you won't get rid of spam in full. So, use some sort of spam filter. Be careful about how strong a filter you use - I think it is better to let some spam through in exchange for not stopping any messages I want to receive.
  • Posted by Deremiah *CPE on 7/12/2006 at 1:37 PM Member
    Hello friends,

    I hope you all are having a Great Day! Life is so wonderful and so are you.

    It appears we are experiencing the inescapeable consequences of success. MARKETING PROFS PROFILES has arrived...and although we all understand what the problem is the only solution is loving change.

    Let's not become overly frustrated by this common occurance. I think all the suggestions are GREAT but still only temporary options. Rather than letting this effect us in a negative way let's all reply saying unanimously

    "we send you only love Pauly Jaja but don't forget if you don't work you can't eat"

    Your Servant, Deremiah, *CPE (Customer Passion Evangelist)
  • Posted by CTO on 7/12/2006 at 1:51 PM Accepted
    Howdy Folks,

    Thanks for bringing this to our attention. SPAMMING and Email Harvesting are two of the biggest problems on the Internet today. We all hate it. The issue is that there is basically no way to stop it, which is why it's such a widespread problem.

    Please rest assured that we take every precaution in protecting your information as it relates to our website.

    Currently, the KHE member profile pages and KHE question pages are open to anyone (or any robot) that accesses these pages. Only members can post, but anyone/anything can read. For those members who have chosen to display their email addresses in their profiles, I have taken the extra precaution of rendering the email address through the use of JavaScript, rather than straight HTML. The email address link appears the same, but it is actually generated via JavaScript, making it harder to detect for spiders/harvesters.

    While this is not 100% effective against harvesting, it does add an extra layer of "encryption" to your email address. But please understand any time we encrypt your email address, someone/something else can decrypt it if sufficiently motivated. As a test, type your email address into Google and see if anything comes up.

    MarketingProfs also features opt-in profile pages in our Member Directory (https://www.marketingprofs.com/directory/search.asp). The Directory offers another means of protecting your email address while still allowing contact from others: It's the "Anonymous Private Email" option. (See it here:
    https://www.marketingprofs.com/newprem/editaccount/acct_profile.asp) This option allows a site visitor to contact you via a Web form, rather than displaying your email address. This feature is an added benefit of Premium and Premium Plus membership (not available to Basic members).

    We also use SSL (https://) for Internet communications like API calls, Memberships and Credit Card Processing, so your information is secured at all times.

    In the end, SPAMMING is an uphill battle that won't ever be won. The only absolute method of protecting your email is not putting your address online anywhere. For example, it's important that you don't post it in a KHE discussion thread (this is one reason Carrie and Val edit out email addresses from forum posts when they see them).

    But, then again, can you stop your brother-in-law from sending you an email to view the family photo album through Kodak or Snapfish, or your sister from buying you something on Old Navy online with your email address?

    Having an email address is kinda like getting a "Red Ryder BB Gun" for Christmas. There's always the chance "you're gonna shoot your eye out" (the age-old "A Christmas Story"). Thank goodness for Junk mail filters and approved sender lists.
  • Posted by steven.alker on 7/12/2006 at 4:05 PM Accepted
    Franks right – these scams are done by hand and they are done from a disposable email address to boot. The reply address sometimes looks the same, but it’s not. It’s more permanent – there’s no point in scamming someone if the poor saps can’t reply to you because the primary address has been shut down.

    By-hand also means that Darcy’s CAPTCHA system won’t work – they’ll just copy by hand anything they can see – they even use the commercial directories from my trade magazines, so some of my clients get their well researched begging letter to them by name, spotted in the “Process Instrumentation Journal” which becomes a reputable Christian publication. Often it involves a long lost relative of the same surname and the usual 15% of $65Million or whatever the record sum Frank found was.

    I don’t give a toss about them and I let my junk filters take care of the majority. I don’t mind having my email address visible to use directly on the site and I’m grateful for the java based protection afforded.

    As we appear to be an intelligent bunch of people, we might also be doing the world of unintelligent or plain greedy people a tiny, tiny favour. As these things are manual, every 5 minutes they spend on emailing us, is 5 minutes they can’t spend of emailing some sap who will fall for the letter!

    Here’s one thing not to do. In the early days of email and before spam filters I got so annoyed with one persistent spammer that I decided to send him 20,000 “Get lost” emails from my own spam-detection proof database. About 2000 got through to annoy them, but at that point, their ISP got fed up with the traffic and closed them down.

    I achieved a pyrrhic victory though. They were temporarily shut down and their inbox had 2000 rude emails in it. Sadly mine got 18,000 bounce-back responses from their now dead address and I think that I let Outlook deliver about 500 of them before I was able to open the server and delete them at source. Then of course, the ISP’s mailer daemon had another go 24 and 48 hours later. Oops!

    Best wishes


    Steve Alker
    Unimax Solutions
  • Posted on 7/13/2006 at 12:32 PM Member
    Dear All,

    WOW! everyone is concerned about Spams thats good. Said spam email is a part of one of the biggest Internet Frauds till date. Anyways these spammers got references from so many places and sometimes send very personalized emails too.

    Marketingprofs.com is a community where people get a lot of good information but at the same time few trace passers are also here. In marketing profs site One can hide ones own identity by selecting hide email option if they are concerned about spams but at the same time they will miss the opportunity to interact with alike minded people across the globe.

    Nothing comes for free Their is a cost for everything!

    Until you are getting free services SPAM will be there.

    Cheers,
    Gaurav
  • Posted by SRyan ;] on 7/15/2006 at 3:32 AM Member
    Steve, I just love the way you think. I'm not big on revenge, but.... those actions are SO perfect.

    Shelley

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    U
  • Posted by Mushfique Manzoor on 7/15/2006 at 4:06 AM Author
    Steve

    brilliant way to tackle!!!!

    i wish there was one such common "enemy of State/Africa" to put in my reply.

    cheers!!
  • Posted by darcy.moen on 7/15/2006 at 11:52 AM Member
    Steve, replying usually only INCREASES the amount of spam you get because now you are a VERIFIED legitimate email address. Spammers will sell a proven real email address for much more money to other spammers. Never ackowledge or reply to spam with your real email address, better off to spoof the senders header and use the same masking back at them, or use a disposable email address account to reply.

    Do ISP's watch their abuse account? Seems that anything addressed to abuse or postmaster at...simply falls into a black hole.

    Sometimes it makes sense to block all Nigerian IP's at the server level, but it harms legitimate email.

    CAPTCHA is not fool proof. Yes, sometimes folks pay smurfs to sit at a keyboard and blogspam, forumspam, and instant message spam...but at leat its creating employment where its needed. CAPTCHA increases their costs (which many spammers loathe to do). Again, I simply block IP's of the offenders.

    I love your idea of loading a loaded file...a spampot if you will. If only one could write a script to automatically add the email address of the recent spammers to the file, so they get tons of spam into their email box...that would be justice! Then again, there is software that clean email lists...so your trick is correctable.

    Darcy Moen
    Customer Loyalty Network

    For the record....while the name Darcy cuts both ways, I'm a dude who definately does NOT look like a lady. :-)
  • Posted by Mushfique Manzoor on 7/17/2006 at 8:44 AM Author
    thanks a lot folks for your comments and inputs!!

    Papadoc (Steave), would you please share with me how you keep a text file containing those garbage email address for 'harvesters'. i would love to replicate that.

    cheers!!
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