Current Status

This blog is not frequently updated because most case-by-case scam reports are now listed in subordinate blogs. At this point in time, most of my efforts are targeted at documenting employment scams in the Suckers Wanted blog.

2006-05-29

Job Scam: mercuryindustries.com

The text of this spam has been placed in an image to prevent it being indexed when it inevitably winds up posted on the web somewhere. I'm not entirely sure what the exact details of this scam are, but it seems to involve eBay fraud, and that leaves open a number of possibilities. Other than that, it has all the usual marks of a job scam: the solicitation is spammed (meaning they want lots and lots of "disposable" employees), there are no qualifications required, the website is completely and utterly vague about what this "company" actually does, but they have "vacancies" prominently displayed.

The domain "mercuryindustries.com" has only been registered since 10-Mar-2006, and their DNS records are suspicious: the time-to-live on the address records is half an hour, and all the addresses point to end-user PCs on cable services or in universities. I'd wager long odds that these are all compromised computers, and that the owners have no idea they're serving up web pages for "Mercury Industries".

I don't plan to pursue this particular scam any further, but if anyone has correspondence with the scammers, please forward it to me and I'll post it here as additional information (after removing any identifying marks such as email addresses).

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