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Spam asking for your personal data - what's the purpose?

A lot of these are not your ordinary crooks, you would be surprised at how many originate out of eastern Europe. If you reply to them in any way, you are taking a risk, some are former KGB and are really gifted. A lot of the time all they want is to verify someone is out there.

You cannot believe how much money is lost every day and not just by gulliable people.
 
I just got this malicious email, which tries to steal the recipient's credit card data, purporting to be from PayPal:

nice_spoofing_paypal_1.png



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I find it funny, but nonetheless it proves the Internet is a dangerous place, indeed!
 
Pepinno said:
I find it funny, but nonetheless it proves the Internet is a dangerous place, indeed!
Click to expand...

That is funny. It always amazes me how these things always have serious gramatical errors. In fact if there was a viable grammar checker, one could likely filter out all spam based on that alone. "Your account have been temporarily limited." - my foot.


I think there is also danger from friendly fire. I often get community newsletters, and the like, with maybe a hundred recipients listed in the "CC" field. That means that my address is being distributed to those same people. I put some of my e-mail addresses right on the web, but I don't like indiscriminate distribution directly to questionable address books. Of course if I was less scrupulous, I could make good use of those lists.
 
Is it just my imagination, or have spammers gotten more creative recently? I've seen a lot more spam that at first glance looks like various semi-legitimate notifications.
 
they have gotten very creative nowadays, I was reading the malwarebytes blog and there is a new paypal one that looks EXACTLY like their secure log in page. even showed you how the guy made it and the iterations it went through to get there. I seem to get it twice a week at best, all coming from a random city in some random country, on even said it came from a city on mars in the header. They have to get more creative anyhow, I think due to security awareness actually being heightened anymore.
 
It seems Paypal is still a top target for spam scamers.

I just got this scam email, without spelling mistakes!

2016_04_02_scam_spam_paypal_2.png
 
A little common sense goes a long way.

Why would anyone ever respond to any of this kind of crap when it's so easy to pick up the phone and then you know whom you're speaking with?

FWIW, two years ago I got a (legitimate) request from Discover to fill out a questionnaire in which there were some nestled questions relating to my total annual income. They claimed they needed this information in order to properly determine how much credit they should give me in the future. Since I felt this was rather intrusive I called them to verify that it was really from them. It was!!! :) They further stated that there was no real need to answer this question if I didn't want to. (Hahaha, they didn't need to tell me something that was already that obvious. :) ) But I decided to play along even though I had already destroyed that card in response to their invasive, probing, questions. I simply indicated that I had made between $10M and $20M every year for the last five years. My credit limit never changed and they still haven't concluded that I will never be doing business with them again.
 
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