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Cyber Risks · Krebs on Security

Clever Gmail Spam Technique

Summary: A Krebs on Security post from January 4, 2010 described a Gmail message that showed a "(3)" next to an unfamiliar sender's name, implying a threaded conversation, when the sender had simply sent the same spam three times in a row. The author noted he could not tell whether the repetition was a deliberate spammer technique or an accident, but that it appeared effective at getting recipients to click a message they would otherwise delete.

What you should know: Gmail groups messages into threads by sender and subject and cannot be turned off, so a spammer who repeats a message can manufacture the appearance of an ongoing conversation with the recipient. Readers of the post reported receiving ten or twenty identical 419 scam messages, and one commenter described threads where follow-up emails appeared to reply to earlier ones, each carrying a bogus link.

Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗

Topics
Data Breaches
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