letters from Santa!

A classic spammer tactic is an offer of something you want at a good price. When the offer is from a well-known (and trusted) business, this might be a deal. But when it is from a stranger who gives no indication of who they are, it’s almost never a good deal.

This season I’ve been flooded with the following spam:

Who wouldn’t want to send their child such a great gift? You might convince yourself something so “nice” couldn’t be a scam. Who would use kids as scam bait!? Right. Let’s see the scam indicators:

• I don’t have any children.
• The date in the message is 2038. This seems to be a new scammer tactic to keep the message as the latest in your inbox whenever you might see it. Any message dated more than 20 years in the future is clearly lying about the date, so you must assume everything else as well.
• The banner at the top telling you to click “not spam” to be able to read it is a dead giveaway. This has shown up in a lot of spam lately and tells me that the spam tools of many email providers are working and causing them trouble. Just as any ad that says “this is perfectly legal” means it is not, any email that tells you to click “not spam” tells you it is spam.

Don’t be fooled into thinking this might really be some deal you want. Best case scenario is they’re desperate merchants trying to sell their poorly delivered product and disappear before you could complain. More than likely they’re collecting credit card data from you to use on the black market and you’ll never see any letter from Santa. Since the ad says nothing about who it is, it’s a stranger. Why would you give an unknown stranger any money, much less a credit card number they could turn around and use as their own?

Have a safe and secure Christmas and 2013.