Info: Impex Consult and Their Annoying Spam

Hi everyone, and a happy new year to you all. The new year has kicked off with the Impex Consult job scam crowd shifting tactics a little. Whereas I've previously been getting spammed by them (and their predecessor identities) at old addresses, I'm no longer seeing much of that activity. That's not to say that they've slowed down the spam: on the contrary, I've received a lot of Impex spam over the past few days -- around seven a day. It's just that it's now sent to my blog contact address rather than my old spamtrap addresses.

Anyhow, the shift seems to have attracted a lot of new people to my blog to see what the heck all this Impex spam is about, and one of the most frequently asked questions is "can I make it stop?" Well, there are two ways to stop spam: one is to get the senders to stop spamming, and the other is to prevent it from being delivered. In this case, the senders are a pack of evil scamming fiends who regard you in a manner similar to the way a wolf regards a sheep, so asking them to stop is probably not going to work. That leaves us with the "dodge delivery" approach.

The absolute best way to solve your spam problem is to retire your old email address and start with something new and unique. There's effort involved, since you have to inform people about your new address, but you can phase it in slowly. Eventually the new address will be discovered by spammers through various kinds of leakage, and you'll have to go through the same change again. That's the price spammers make us pay, sadly.

It's not all doom and gloom, though. If you're a Gmail user like me, then all your Impex spam is already landing in the "spam" folder. I only know about it because I study my spam folder in my capacity as a deception spotter. If you are a Gmail user and can't stand the Impex junk even in your "spam" folder, then you can create a filter to delete it automatically. Just click on "create a filter", put "Impex Consult" in the field marked "From:", check the box marked "Has attachment", and click on "Next Step". In the next step, check the box marked "delete it", then click on "Create Filter". This will send all incoming Impex spam directly to the deleted items folder -- until such time as they change their name or stop sending the spam as image attachments, at least.