Car complaint? Viagra spammers will rev up your engine

Filed Under: Spam

Spammers need you to read their message in order to have any chance of selling to you.

So, the first challenge for them is to get you to open their email in the first place. Quite often we see the spammers use a hard-to-resist subject line pretending to be a personal message ("Shall we meet again?" or "He-he-he.. Your photo"), or an unlikely to fulfil promise ("100% success with chicks").

We saw a Viagra spam campaign today which claims that, from the subject line at least, might make you think that there have been complaints about your car:

Car complaint spam email

We've also seen this campaign using the subject line "Neighbor's meeting about car crash".

You can understand how spam messages like this might be opened by people, but what's baffling is that once duped by a phoney subject line people are still happy to buy pharmaceuticals from these guys.

After all, they're clearly not reputable as they've lied about their intentions with the email. So why would you place your health in their hands by buying sexual performance drugs from them?

About the author

Graham Cluley is senior technology consultant at Sophos. The readers of Computer Weekly voted him security blogger of the year in 2009 and 2010, and he pipped Stephen Fry to the title of "Twitter user of the year" too. Which was nice. He was also named "Best Security Blogger" by the readers of SC Magazine in 2011. You can subscribe to Graham's updates on Facebook, follow him on Twitter and circle him on Google Plus for regular updates.