The mail address I'm using for this blog was created solely for the purpose of catching scam mail and phishing. I was aware that some spam would show up eventually, having an address exposed does that.
I'll explain first how to get into the mailing list of the scammers. They're "farming" (collecting mail addresses by means of a computer program) from guest books mostly. Not too far ago, they did this job by hand, but they're learning the tricks of the trade and they do learn fast. All you have to do is go to a guest book, post, use your mail address and wait for it. This system was used by spammers a long time ago. But spam is now a profitable commercial activity, they want to get the most of their investment and the databases built from guest books were of poor quality. The ratio of good addresses to bad ones was low and to make matters worse a lot of the bad ones were obvious fakes. So they move to better sources of mail addresses and let the guest books alone.
For scammers, the equation is completely different. They're willing to try millions of addresses just to get one, THE ONE. Because for them one customer is good enough, is all they need to keep going for a while. So the guest books are an excellent option.
I can tell you how to defend against them but is useless, it means that you're aware already and even if they target you, you won't fall for it.
The guest books used by scammers (nigerian scammers) are marked after being sow to tell other scammers not to use it and to sow again from that point the next time. If you want to look at them, they use the words mugu and maga. Just Google for guest book mugu or maga and you'll see what I mean. Mugu is a derogatory term in Nigeria and maga is a scammer. So for a maga we are mugus and the magas are mugus for us (kind of complicated, isn't it?). I can't understand what's the meaning of mugu or its origins, but I can tell you that is really really bad for them. Once I cheer one of them with a Muguuuuu muguuuu muguuuu and he got so mad, so MAD. But I explained him that, because we were doing this business transaction togheter, I went to a nigerian forum and asked about an honorific way to address him and that was what they told me to do. True story, and if you think that's hard to believe read this, he bought it!
The funny thing about this is that they really want to keep other magas from their "crop field". If you send a message to a mugu posing as Mariam Abacha (wife of nigerian dictator Sani Abacha) and after that the same person gets another from another Mariam Abacha with a diffrent story, he'll think that something is wrong. And that's exactly what's going on today, they're taking the same addresses from the same places and sending the same scams. Whoever said that there's honor between criminals wasn't talking about the nigerian scammers.
Going back to this mail address, it was exposed on a couple guest books and the scam messages come everyday. Spam? not too much, just a couple. I started this blog at 3 PM (local time) and by 5 PM the spam started to come at a rate of 4 per hour. Are they taking addresses from here?
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