by Administrator on February 5, 2010
I’ve been noticing that some of my Twitter follow requests have received direct messages asking me to validate my profile via a service called TrueTwit.
Some quick research showed me that I won’t be doing so any time soon.
Just a quick check on the domain name shows that it is registered via “Direct Privacy ID xxxxxx” to an address in the Cayman Islands.
So who is behind the service? What happens when I “verify” my profile or whatever? Is it going to request — or require — access to my profile? If so, what are they going to take, especially since the owner seems to be hiding behind a domain registration proxy service?
To my trained, professional, skeptical eye, this looks like an attempt to steal a bit of personal information and perhaps even take over my Twitter account and do not-so-nice things to my followers — and to do so anonymously and outside of the convenient reach of my government.
Yuck.
Hey, I’m all for systems that will help prevent the spread of spam (as regular readers of this blog know), but until I learn more, I’d have to be a TrueTwit to click on one of those links without knowing what’s on the other end.
So sorry, KipDurney (and anyone else using the service), but I won’t be a-clickin’ that link anytime soon. Hope you understand (and I do welcome your comments. This isn’t about disliking you; it’s about some service I’ve never heard of, registered to who-knows-what in a tax haven, and the security of my computer and Twitter profile).
In other words, it doesn’t look very “tweet” at all!
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by Administrator on February 5, 2010
I just received another spam email, this one with the following disclaimer:
REMOVAL OPTION:
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Under Bill HR 1910 passed by the 106th US Congress on May 24, 1999, This message cannot be considered Spam as long as we include the way to be remove.Reply to youremoval@gmail.com and type “Unsubscribe”. All removal requests are handled immediately once received.Thank you.
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(Oops! forgot to remove another spammer email address… Enjoy, robots!)
Let’s make this one short and sweet. Your first hint that this spammer is blowing smoke up your “whatever” is the “HR”, which stands for “House Resolution”. As in “House of Representatives”. If it’s a “Resolution”, it isn’t a “Law”.
And this link very clearly shows that this particular “resolution” died in committee over 10 years ago.
Yes, this never became law due to “death by committee”.
In other words, there ain’t no such thing as Bill HR 1910, and it sure wasn’t passed EVER, much less on May 24, 1999 (that was the day it was introduced, in case you were keeping score). And the short title was “E-Mail User Protection Act”, which is included here for reference sake.
We won’t even talk about the poor grammar (i.e. “we include the way to be remove” — not that my grammar in this particular post is much better…) or the lack of spaces between sentences, which just SCREAMS “SPAM from a non-English speaker who thinks that any time somebody so much as farts in Congress it becomes law” (which isn’t the case, although if it were, it would explain some of the stuff that comes out of there…). However, this one seems to have originated in Los Angeles, which isn’t exactly a foreign country, so my guess is that the spammer had the script written overseas.
This bill called for a $50 penalty for each “unsolicited bulk electronic mail message”. CAN-SPAM — which did become law — is currently calling for $16,000 per “unsolicited bulk electronic mail message” (or UCE, or SPAM, or whatever you want to call the garbage).
So HR 1910 would have been a spammer’s dream when compared to CAN-SPAM, potentially saving a spammer $15,950 for each email sent. Some spammers could probably afford that, don’t you think? Pity it was never passed…
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