(no title)
nadams | 10 years ago
How do people fall for phishing scams or running malware from an email attachment? The answer to that question is the same to yours. I think it's a combination of lack of public education about scams and the belief that the email or phone call is legit.
And I think it's really interesting. A lot of people talk about "infected" PDFs - I've personally never seen that but what I usually see are:
invoice.pdf.exe
invoice.pdf.js
Most sane email providers should scrub that attachment (or bounce it) - however email providers such as AOL don't. Thanks AOL.
I run my own email service and I get emails like these all the time [1]. And if you are someone who takes the tollway daily it could be a scary email that you open right away.
I do want to mention Amazon's practices. So it appears their system glitches and spews out this email to random people [2]. This email is plain text and, at least the last time I logged into my account, has no indication that they want this information (it does say that "functionality is limited" but those instructions that say to login to the site and submit your information are incorrect which immediately makes me think it's a scam - it even has typos that you would find on a scam email!). It's even been reported that customer service says that it is a scam. However, it is real and an easy template to scam people out of their identity. For less than the cost of a cup of coffee at starbucks you can get an 800 number from a VOIP provider with faxing ability. I've contacted Amazon about it....and they just sent me the same email back. Thanks Amazon. (You don't know how tempted I am to write a cron job that faxes a copy of my drivers license to them every hour)
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