July 9th, 2009
Snake oil at its slickest: A social media spam story
I’ll tell you a little secret: I love spam. No, not that icky meat-like stuff in a can. The email kind. I’m not silly enough to click on most of it but I love reading the headlines and intros. The ridiculousness of it all makes me laugh most of the time, and then I can continue my laughter when I learn of people clicking on these things as if they are real. So yes, I scan my spam filter folder every day, just hoping for hidden gems of hilarity.
Since I’m so on top of my spam I can pretty much mentally catalog which ones I get and how often (I used to keep a running tab on “v1agra” ads, just for kicks). I noticed the following spam from “trusocialguru” a few times within a week:
No kidding? Social media snake oil is becoming so rampant that potential scammers have taken to spamming out emails like this in the hopes of what? Making money, of course. I couldn’t let this go. It wasn’t even amusing this time; it was more of a reality check on the state of our industry. My friends at Web security company Purewire helped pave the way for me to dig into the situation by checking out the Internet trail for malicious code:
“The link in the email took me through a series of redirects that ended at a (benign) site advertising a “make money on the Internet via social media” program, which is unlikely to make people anywhere near the amount of money it claims,” said Paul Royal, principle researcher for Purewire. “It’s a 2009 analogue to the early 1990s commercials with Don Lapre selling a program that enabled people to get rich by placing “tiny classified ads’.”
Next: Who is this “trusocialguru”? –>
Jennifer Leggio, aka "Mediaphyter," writes about the "social business" side of social media - including enterprise, security and reputation issues. See her full profile and disclosure of her industry affiliations.
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| 07/09/09
