Today I’ve received two copies of a spam message claiming I’ve won a free cruise. The spam sends me to a website hosted by Rackspace.com, whose “fanatical support” staff has so far failed to take any action at all, despite two phone calls and two emailed reports from me.
The second spam I received demonstrates the wizardry involved. The spammer’s mail-merge script is broken… note the variable names in the body of the spam:
Dear $First_Name,
Sometime over the past 6 months you signed
up for one of our free cruises or vacation
package. We regret to inform you that the
information we received was incomplete. We
received the following information
$First_Name $Last_Name , 415-555-1212 .
While I’m relieved, but not particularly surprised to see that the spammer isn’t very smart, I’m dismayed to have it proved
once again that
Network Solutions has been selling my private data. The phone number in the spam (which I’ve altered above) was my office line in 1996 and remains in the registration records for several of my domains; given NSI’s disrespect for my privacy I haven’t since seen the need to give them accurate data.
I also enjoyed noticing that 50% of the data in the spam was useless HTML markup and proprietary Microsoft META tags, which add no value to the spam and serve only to increase the bandwidth costs for the spammer. The spam seems to have originated at 209.61.156.83, which is a Rackspace.com server (real pity they don’t answer their phone, or they could stop this campaign before it finishes), so it is somewhat likely the spammer is paying for actual bandwidth used — assuming, of course, they have any intention of paying their Rackspace.com bill at all.
Update: Rackspace came through! They’ve taken the spammer’s site offline.
Tags:
posted to channel: Privacy
updated: 2004-02-22 22:49:16
