Spam-A-Lot
A strange thing has been happening on my Yahoo email account. I’ve had it for years and only very rarely received any junk mail. That is, until recently, when my ‘Bulk’ mail folder has been bulging.
However, this is not the regular credit card, porno and ‘personal enhancement’ traffic. The titles of each email is something so wonderfully weird and random that even a hardened internet junkie such as myself can’t help but click into them from time to time. For example, I have recently had emails with the titles ’systematically viable’, ‘disintegration cook’, ‘ignorant implicitly’, ‘phonetic Down’s syndrome’ (sic), ‘aggression barometer’, ‘mallet hang-up’, ‘canoe rabies’, ‘affair reenact’ (sic), ‘coronary microscope’ and ‘indistinct cyrillic’, to name a few.
Now I think I understand the logic behind these weird names. People no longer click on ’six more inches’ or ‘no more debts’ emails because they’ve become hardened to them. Spammers are sending billions upon billions of these into the ether and getting very little return. However, if you send these out through a random word generator the odds are that someone, somewhere is going to get something of interest delievered to them eventually.
So, anyway. These weird junk mails piqued my interest and I clicked into one at random. This is what I found:
Odd. A stock market tip with a ’strong buy’ recommendation. Nothing to do with any kind of aggression barometor whatsoever. And seemingly designed by a child of seven.
Now, I understand the point of flooding email inboxes with stock market tips for your own company. I can even understand a morally bankrupt company paying a ‘purveyor of spam’ to send stock tips to a few billion inboxes on the off-chance that someone will take a chance and invest in a business. I’m sure even a success rate of something stupid like 0.00001% could make the endeavour worthwhile. I’m even happy to believe that the weird-ass wonky writing and clashing colour scheme is some way of avoiding spam filters, or something along those lines. However, I have great difficulty in understanding the spurt of gibberish that follows the stock tip:
Micro-divestment, a term I invented half an hour ago, can target a specific individual within a specific set of economic circumstances.
With the Palestinian authority having elections and with Sharon having invited the opposition Labour party into a unity government the prospects for peace are looking brighter as this year ends. Please tell anxious mothers they should not use this device because of your passionate cause.
One gets the impression from MSM that this rather unassuming man is a modern day Torquemada. So if you know anyone suffering from MS, tell them to ignore the Israeli patent that may more accurately diagnose their symptoms.
Anderson had been heading the investigation of a coup attempt on Chavez. The accountability of government officials is an obligation, not a luxury.
This is just an excerpt of a long, rambling diatribe that makes absolutely no sense no matter how many times you read it. Did someone write this, or is it computer generated filler? Was it put in by mistake? What relevance does it have to the stock tip?
A search for ‘PRG Group Inc’ on Spamnation does little use as ‘(the company) has not yet responded to inquiries concerning spam promoting the company’. The PRG website, meanwhile, hints at a technology consultancy with no mention of a Palestinan coup by Multiple Sclerosis sufferers (I think that was the gist of the gibberish after the stock tip). I remain confused. Seriously, guys, what’s the point?
And one more mystery. An Email I received in October of this year (’Fine arts languid’) bears the date stamp : Thu 01 Jan 1998.
At a stretch, I can understand what these spammers are trying to achieve, even if simplifying to the point of saying ‘any publicity is good publicity’. But why go to the effort of trying to pretend that the email was sent almost nine years in the past?
As a great man once said : ‘take a crayon and colour me confused’.
November 24th, 2006 at 3:22 pm
Allow me.
At present, the best tech available for spam filtering is statistical analysis (also called Bayesian filtering) based upon your own personal inbox. Rather than using generic rules/filters (DELETE IF “Viagra”), you feed programs such as DSPAM (which I use) a corpus of your e-mail (I trained it with around ~2,000 “spam” and ~2,500 “ham” messages) and it then assigns each incoming message a spam probability and confidence level.
This works very well: you can get around “Viagra” with “V1@gr@”, but once every person has a customized filter based on their own friends, your job becomes much tougher. Hence messages with nonsensical subjects and large blocks of unrelated text in an attempt to “dilute” the message so that the filter doesn’t spot the loaded words.
The image you got takes the battle further. First, by appearing as a graphic, anti-spam software can’t read the text and therefore can miss dead giveaway words (”strong buy”, “3-day target”). Theoretically, the spam scanner could employ OCR to “read” the text in an image, but in practice this is way too computationally intensive. Your spammer takes no chances, though, employing an anti-OCR varied background and shifting baseline to make a captcha-style image that would be tough to deciper even by humans.
Thus, the statistical spam filter only “sees” a message that seems to be highly original, with none of the words that set it off. And that’s why these are the only kinds of spam that actually make it into my inbox.
Bonus 1: I would be shocked if the company itself was involved in the sending of these messages. The bump in value is incredibly short-lived, and soliciting a stock purchase (without a prospectus) is against the law in the U.S. The company’s execs could be punished and the stock delisted as a result.
Which is why third parties love the penny (OTC) stocks: low investment, high volatility. Buy, pump, dump.
Bonus 2: I installed DSPAM in February, and my spam folder just passed 8,000 messages. You’d except them all to be from Feb-Nov ‘06, but instead I have messages from 1969, 1980, 1997… through to 2037 and 2038.
Why? I expect the answer lies in how many e-mail clients handle new mail. In my case (Thunderbird), when new mail is checked the screen automatically scrolls to show the first (oldest) new message. Suppose I checked my e-mail right now and got 10 new e-missives, one of which was dated 1998. Thunderbird would helpfully scroll to the bottom of my e-mail, showing a boldfaced spam… all by its attention-grabbing lonesome.
November 28th, 2006 at 10:05 am
Thanks John. For some sad reason I actually found myself hoping against hope that the gibberish was something profound.
It is fascinating how every weird, seemingly random, little facet of such a superficially odd email is part of a contrived and cynical attempt to fool the Interweb’s spam filters.
I’d say my faith in the fundamental goodness of human nature has now been irretrievably shattered, but that happened many years ago.
November 29th, 2006 at 1:54 am
Yeah, it’s a sad little arms race indeed. Making it even worse: 15 min after I posted that, I got a spam which included this disclaimer:
If true, that means the spammer got $25k for “distribution” of this scam. Sigh…