Celebrity Image Used For Spamming Once Again

In the upcoming US Open's honor, a scamming attempt that besides masquerading as a prominent financial institution also filches Tiger Woods' - renowned golfer - image, as published by Post-gazette on May 27, 2007.

As part of the attempt, a spam email purportedly originating form Charlotte, NC based banking major Wachovia displays an image of Woods, in which the star player is shown smiling after clinching the winner's cup from Wachovia Championship, which he had won on May 4, 2007.

However, the celebrity player's picture is the only distinctive feature in this spam scam. As the reader goes through its textual content, it appears pretty generic, cautioning about a probable security breach in the account of the user and advising the user to click on a link (which is actually forged) so that the situation could be brought under the control.

Like several other spam emails, this email too has few odd touches, which make the recipient suspect that its author isn't an English-speaking person by birth. Stilted grammar, cryptic wrongly typed fragment in the paragraph's end, lower case "wachovia", and other spelling mistakes make the recipient smell something fishy about this email.

Scammers have invented newer tactics to attack networks. "Image Link Spam" establishes a hyperlink to picture that contains a URL in its text, which is very much unlike usual images spamming. This new trend is catching fast across spammers throughout the globe and has already received much of the acclaim of cyber crooks.

The Anti phishing Working Group, which is a syndicate of software firms, payments networks as well as law enforcement agencies, reported that unique phishing scams grew by 5% from February and reached 24,853 during March. However, January had shown even more stunning numbers. In this month spamming attacks had hit 30,000. The biggest targets of these scams remained financial services, which accounted for above 91% of all phishing attacks.

"Phishing scams are rapidly increasing in numbers as well as sophistication, thereby posing serious security threats to online information of consumers and companies," Dave Jevans, Anti phishing Working Group's Chairman said this in a statement that Antiphishing.org had published.

Related article: California’s Governor Vetoed a Bill on Consumer Data Protection

» SPAMfighter News - 6/6/2007