Spammers New Attack

Well, it seems that spammers neither die nor go away. No, instead they find new ways to target people.

I'm very leary of all unsolicited email these days. Take the following:

Good day,

My name is Edward Johnson and I am looking to buy links from good websites as yours (xjs.com). I will be glad if I can have a text link or a text box 120x60 or 125x125 on your site. Please advise what what will be the price for each of these ads, if it is placed:

1. On your homepage only
2. On all site pages

I will be very thankful to you if you take into consideration my requrest.

Kind Regards

Edward Johnson

Hmm. I actually have a relative named "Edward Johnson" but he'd never send this email to me. Additionally, the from field of the email says "Stacia Hatfield [ahmed_hassan202000@yahoo.it]". Wow! That's three names and two different genders, and one might think multiple nationalities though it's hard to tell for certain.

But I remember I used to get a lot of email from a "Stacy Hatfield" back in the old days before I got cagier with my email address. What do you want to bet these are one and the same since no other spammer would use such an easy flag.

The other approach is to say that they want to buy my domain name. I'm sorry, but I know that at least half of these "offers" and "enquiries" are just trying to confirm an email address for spammers. The message is simply to vague to be treated as credible, but alas, I don't have any saved. I wonder why?

But this one is more troubling:

Hello,

I recently found your website: http://www.xjs.com/xianjiro/blog/xjvrl.html online for other good blogs. I run my own blog Bayareakicks.com, and I am trying to link to other blogs I think my visitors might like to visit once they are done on my site.

Since my website is visited by 1,000's of blog readers daily, I am positive many of my visitors would be interested in visiting your web blog once they leave mine. I figured you wouldn't mind if I link to your site since we are not competitors, and both have similar internet viewers on our sites. Please let me know if this is OK with you? Do you think you can link back to my website Bayareakicks.com? Thanks.

Murris

Hmmm. He's actually included the real link to the page where I used to write about movies and books, but let's see, my last entry was April 9, 2006 and it was titled "Am I Still Interested?" Gee, given the dates, one might think the answer was "NO!"

I just bet this one is really spam as well. He uses the same email address that spammers get off the domain name whois query. But this one is much slier and works on everyone's desire for an easy link. It uses flattery well and then just waits for me to confirm the email address or better yet, reply from another, real email account.

Nope, it looks like it's time to change that nasty spam-bait email address I have to provide the domain name host. What a pain! But at least this way it takes a lot longer for the spammers to find the email address and now that I know one is spreading through their nasty databases, it's time for a change.