For the last two days, I have received about 5 spam emails with a suggestive subject line like “CNN – The daily top”. 10. While I am used to spam and while they get blocked (mostly) by my spam filters, this spam campaign has been unusually successful in getting their emails to me.
I did bother to open one of the emails and while I knew instantly that the server they were linking to (beta.wwf.it) could not be sending out a CNN email, I found the copy compelling. Oddly enough the headlines were written by someone who would be quite uniquely aware of the US current affairs and the email template design looked quite like a real CNN email.
Every subsequent email uses a different server to host the content that these emails link to and also a different return email address. Clicking on any link within these emails takes you to an ActiveX download message which I did not bother to mess with.
I would be quite interested in knowing how these people actually make any profits engaging is such an activity. Put into legal use, skills used in spamming could be utilized by almost any corporation reaching out to a large audience. So I fail to understand why someone would take so much creative interest and risk incarceration to spam.
Here are some screenshots: