Sophos Cloud Optix
As many of the blog readers are aware, Advance Fee fraud scammers will abuse any free service they can get their hands on to send out their spam messages. Previously, we blogged about the scammers abusing services such as web proxies.
In recent days, a group of Nigerian scammers have started abusing the “share-a-comic-strip” feature on Dilbert.com. The scammers do this by including their own fraud message inside the “personal message” portion of the sent messages. This is probably a money-making scheme that Dogbert would approve of.
Here are two of the samples we received today:
The content of the messages are pretty typical of Advance Fee frauds – about assisting in the donation of money to the underprivilaged or the transfer of money out of a politically unstable region. Ironically, today’s strip similarly features Dogbert trying to defraud money from the company by padding his stock options.
I am pretty sure the scams messages above would motivate the Elbonians to follow suit to start running advance fee scams of their own.
Jokes aside, as more and more websites add additional functionality to allow sharing of pages through social networking and communication protocols such as facebook, twitter, email, SMS, etc., we’ll be seeing more and more of these services being abused. It is time for webmasters to start putting in some effort to secure these services from abuse.