An Interesting Tactic

[kaasirpent]

Over the past couple of weeks, I've gotten a bunch of spam with the following pattern for the subject line:

<Famous Person> died

For instance:

Kanye West died
Justin Timberlake died
Jay-Z died
Brad Pitt died
Angelina Jolie died
J.K. Rowling died
Johnny Depp died
Jennifer Lopez died

What I found interesting about this is first of all who the spammers put in their "famous person that, upon hearing they died, naïve people would open the email without looking at who it's from" list. It is an interesting list. The one that probably would have gotten me was J. K. Rowling. It didn't, of course, because that particular email was from Woodrow Otero, which, while it is an interesting name, is not the name of a person I know. Nor is the email address "Mr. Otero" used.

Second, I found this amusing when I carefully opened them to see the contents and found that all of them have exactly the same text inside except for the name:

<Famous Person>died along with 34 other people when the Air Force CT-43 "Bobcat" passenger plane carrying the group on a trip crashed into a mountainside while approaching the Dubrovnik airport in Croatia during heavy rain and poor visibility.

Please see attachment

And not only were they identical right down to the Dubrovnik reference, each of them had a different name at the front, and that name didn't match what was in the subject of the email.

So, the body was identical, and even though the subject said "Justin Timberlake died," the body said "Madonna" or "Gwen Stefani" or "Ronaldinho" (whoever that is).

Third, each of them had an attachment called "News.html". In all the ones I checked, "News.html" had the exact same 64-bit encoding, so it's identical.

Finally, the thing I found most interesting about this particular class of spam is that...well, it is compelling. :) "OH MY GOD! J. K. Rowling died? What happened‽" <click>

I wonder what that says about those of us for whom this is true?

And I wonder what it says about the spammers that they're so effective at taking advantage of this quirk of human nature?

 The Humanist Hour #53: Bill Nye the Science Guy, Humanist of the Year by Humanist Network News, (c) American Humanist Association from Humanist Network News Podcast (Rating: 0)

Comments

[dorsai.livejournal.com]

I thought those circumstances sounded familiar:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_Croatia_USAF_CT-43_crash

Maybe your spam isn't 'ripped from the headlines', but 'ripped from Wikipedia'?

[kaasirpent]

Wow. Good catch. I figured it was just made up. I didn't even think to check real stories for "Dubrovnik, Croatia."

[dorsai.livejournal.com]

I only remember it because Ron Brown was on the flight, and there were some good conspiracies floating around at the time about why Bill Clinton wanted to kill him off. :)

[feuervogel]

Ronaldinho is a futbol player from Brazil.

[friend-soscho.livejournal.com]

I've been getting a lot of those lately too.

And the better one that I have received deals with an excel spreadsheet for the 2010 budget.

What is great about this one is that there is one paragraph dealing with the "contents" of the file.

The second paragraph says "and for those of you too lazy to open up the file, I will tell you what it says"

Why is this hilarious to me??? I work for my dad. He and I are the only two that have email addresses for his company. There is no reason for me to be getting a 2010 budget from him .