Over the past few weeks, I’ve received a serious flood of similar email messages that claim to be from well-known businesses like Harbor Freight, CVS, Kroger, Marriot, Costco, FedEx, Walmart, and even Cheesecake Factory. They often come in pairs, one to each of my two most-used email addresses. They all have a common theme: Something free is waiting for you; click here and claim it! Sometimes it’s customer points that were lost, for FedEx they apologize for losing your package, and offer gifts as recompense.
I’ve gotten as many as 150 of these in a single day. Fewer show up on weekends, and there was a week awhile back when they abruptly stopped coming, only to resume the following week.
I know they’re fake because the From address domain is never the domain of the business proper, but something silly like “goonads.com”. Furthermore, as best I can tell, the From domain is used once and never again. (I get two identical copies of each because two of my emails are on their list.)
The emails are often decorated with graphics copied from the supposed sender’s site to make them look legit. And there is only one URL embedded in any of them, labeled as “Click here to claim your gift” or “Click here to enter your delivery address” etc. No, I haven’t clicked on any of those bogus domains. There are well-known hazards in doing so. I’m posting here mainly to see if this is happening to any of my readers. Researching things like this online shows them going back several years, but mine started maybe 5 or 6 weeks ago.
So. Anybody else getting rained on with scammy free gift offers? Drop a comment below.
I get these many times a day; but in outlook or rocketmail only…and the spam filters automatically moves them to spam. I never see them. I did see a few a day maybe 6 months ago, but the spam filters seem to have improved.
I get a few of them as well. They tend to come in spurts, too.
On an active day I’ll receive 10 to 12 spam emails, but more typical is < 5. A coworker of mine sent me an email greeting card a few years back, and my spam emails spiked significantly after that. Also, I never request an email receipt at a self-checkout counter.
Yeah, I still get spam, but rarely I rarely see it anymore. Gmail is a spam magnet, but I rarely use that account anymore and they do good job of filtering out the crap anyway. My main account is on a more obscure provider, which spammers might not target as much. For commerce purposes I usually use a Duck.com address so that trackers are removed before a message is sent to me. To that end I also never, ever allow my mail reader to display remote images. I’ve heard that such URLs usually contain trackers, which can lead to more spam.
Piles of them, and they are very repetitious. Yeti somethings, C0stc0 somethings, Harbor Freight, a few others, repeated over and over with slight variations.
I do not know what their game is. These spam messages look so fake that I wouldn’t expect many people to click on them. They usually have obvious spelling errors.
Some kind of denial of service, simply filling up mailboxes?
I read somewhere that bad grammar and spelling in spam is deliberate, because it helps weed out all but the most credulous.
Some of that bad spelling and grammar works against them. Michael Covington mentioned “C0stc0” above, which I got often enough to make it a spam filter. I have another filter called “The Usual Suspects,” which filters on domains I get spam from regularly. Most of those are health-related and trying to sell supplements. I’m not sure what the Free Gift spams are trying to do and won’t waste time on them. My best guess is that they’re phishing for personal information.
I get a few. One thing is that they usually have a street address at the bottom. One can look it up with Google StreetView, and find that it’s something like a Thai restaurant in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Or a Staples store in Colorado Springs.
I’ve done that too. Gotta love Google Maps for that kind of thing.
I am reminded of several proverbs –
There is no such thing as a free lunch”
“Beware of Greeks (Geeks?) bearing gifts”
As others have mentioned, Gmail does a decent job of sending these to my spam folder, which I eyeball & purge every couple of weeks. The ones that slip through I tag which hopefully trains the spam filters a little more.