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Loading ...The spammer who would buy your house
By Joaquim P. Menezes -
While most of us have been reading about the slowdown in the U.S. housing market with a certain detached interest, one group of people have been very carefully studying the situation, and devising products to capitalize on it.
No, they aren’t real estate brokers, they’re spammers (though, there may some overlap there, going by all the assorted marketing crap - flyers, cards, brochures etc. - I find outside my door or stuffed into my mail box – and cold calls from agents who can’t pronounce my name, but give me the usual line: “I’ve heard you may be interested in selling your house.”)
Anyway, according to Symantec’s latest ‘State of the Spam Report’ (for October 2007), cyber crooks are doing their darndest to capitalize on the uncertainty in the U.S. housing market.
Symantec, says the report, has recently observed “a plethora of spam messages which are trying to tap into the market uncertainty.”
Their modus operandi: a combination of scare tactics and enticements.
Spam messages run the gamut from from barely credible refinancing deals, to offers on houses to asking users if the “Equity” in their home is being used.
According to the report, common Subject lines include:
Pay your house off in 5 – 7 years
I want to buy your house
We Buy Houses
Get the dough out of your house
The idea apparently is to collect as much personal information as possible from hapless recipients of their spam emails.
So after stoking the latter’s fears about the consequences of a market slowdown, the e-mail offers them an “opportunity” to find out whether their house is eligible for one of those spectacular offers.
The rest is pretty much stardard operating procedure - as far as spam emails go.
“During the evaluation process, the spammer collects a large amount of personal information about the user such as name, address, email address, telephone number, etc.”
