I get a lot of pleasure when looking at my email inbox, as through the implementation of my own email filtering solution – (Project Odyssey) – I never actually receive any spam at all. Every single last piece of spam is neatly quarantined for me to check out.
I got a real laugh out of one I found trapped this morning entitled – “Your VISA card 4XXX XXXX XXXX XXXX: possible fraudulent transaction”. Now, we’ve all seen how when referring to your credit card number online, the REPUTABLE agencies block out everything except the last three or four digits, so you can see that you are using the correct credit card information they have recorded for you.
The giggle coming from this spam message is that they show the first digit – 4 – and blank out the rest. Hello! All VISA cards start with 4! So, that’s a match for every VISA card in existence – so the spammers are once again preying on the less astute to say – “holy shit, that’s right, that’s how my card number starts!”.
What is less funny is that far too many people will fall for it, which is why a new way of attacking the spam problem needs to be found and agreed upon in the internet community as a whole, to remove the threat of online credit card fraud, and other privacy invasions. There are ways to do it, but only with a 100% buy-in into attacking it. Every ISP and domain registrar needs to be in on it. It can be done.