The Spam Gallery is a series of posts that give examples of spam messages, explaining telltales signs of how they are spam.
This email is working on the premise that you must act before thinking. Like most spam, the link will redirect you to a page where you are at risk of virus/trojan/worm infections. This email has the following traits:
- The FROM address is unfamiliar. It uses the same domain as my email address, which could be effective in a large corporation, where you may not recognize the person, but the you familiarize with the email address. This is known as “affinity fraud”.
- There is no personal information in the email to indicate that the email was sent directly to me.
- Most people would paste the URL to the bill in the email. This email has the URL hidden behind a label (“Here is the bill”). Although it isn’t difficult for the average person to do this, it isn’t likely that if the email was sent in a hurry, the sender would take the time to format the link in that way.
- I’m unsure of what the purpose of the “Secure Checksum” closing line on a lot of these spam messages means, but it’s beginning to be a sign of spam.
Always check the address of links in emails. If the sender is someone you don’t recognize, slow down. If you receive a message like this at work, check the company directory to see if it really is someone that works there.