Info: Job Scam Changes, February 2007

This month has finally seen the demise of Impex Consult, active since December 2006, but the tail end of Norden continues to trickle in (active since November 2006), although only the domain "norden.hk" seems to be active anymore. Meanwhile, two new names have started showing up in a big way: Radius Investments and August Insurance. The "Radius Investments" scam is causing more damage than usual, because it is ripping off the identity of a real company, which is naturally suffering harm to its reputation through no fault of its own. On the plus side, it means that someone is motivated to stomp on the scammers and their domain registrations hard, fast, and continuously -- with lawyers -- which is about what it takes. My guess is that the scammers will give up on the idea of impersonating real companies pretty quickly because of this opposition -- but wait and see, because my predictions aren't always right.

Also worthy of note so far this month is a move away from image-based spam. The Impex Consult scam was the biggest contributor of such spam to inboxes last month (so far as job scams are concerned), and Radius is the major contributor this month, but the August scam has fallen back to plain text. The August spams have also been free of hyperlinks to their websites, and this has aided them in bypassing spam filters to a large degree.