Spam we never finished reading

Occasionally I check my AOL spam folder, just to make sure nothing important ended up there. AOL does a darn good job of filtering out spam; I routinely get 15-20 spams per day, and they all get squirreled away without my ever seeing them.

I don't like Spam!

Did I say 15-20 per day?

I just checked my AdBlock Plus -- which is a third party add-on provided by AOL I believe -- and was GOBSMACKED by the total:

Quote :

Number of items blocked

1,378,946 in total

Why can’t spammers find a native English speaker to proofread?

Quote :

This email was sent from a notice just location that can't acknowledge approaching email. Kindly don't answer to this message.

Spam folder has 833 items in it.  In just the last 30 days (since April 19).

That is 833 ÷ 30 = 27.76 per day!  And that's just the ones it caught -- I probably have another 10 per day that I have to manually mark as spam.  Hard to believe that spamming is that profitable.

AdBlock total is now 2,095,904.

Did I say 10 per day? I just checked my Recently Deleted folder, which holds items for seven days. There are 91 e-mails in it.

Got a couple spams recently that were new approaches.

One, supposed from Netflix, tells me that somebody in India is using my Netflix account. It looks very official, with the logo and address of Netflix. But if you highlight the sender's address and look at the details... it ain't Netflix.

The other was supposedly from HP print services, saying somebody was using my account (which I do have one). Again, the sender is some random string of characters having nothing to do with HP.

Spammers are getting more devilishly clever, and harder to discern.

Just got an amateurish spam "from AOL" themselves telling me my account would closed if I didn't click this link.

Yah, right.

I deleted it and moved on. Then I went back: I wonder if I should send it to AOL security? After all, it purports to come from them, and they might want to move on the perpetrators.

So I went to AOL security and started poking around. Very squirrelly about how to report spam. "Check your terms of service" it said. Huh?

So I followed the link and eventually found the operant sentence. "Customer support is only available to customers with a paid account."

I've had free e-mail through AOL for at least three decades, and as I mentioned above they (and the other programs I have running) do a very good job of snipping out over a hundred spams per day. For free.

So. I hope that email really is spam.

Got another spam today that is, hands-down, the most official looking spam I've ever received. It purports to be a receipt for a $719.99 Dell touchscreen laptop ordered from Amazon.

Except the return address is Intuit, makers of Turbo-Tax. Which I didn't use this year.

Needless to say, I didn't order a laptop from Amazon either, and to confirm I called my bank and there is no $719.99 charge on my credit card.

But damn. It looks totally legit.

Intuit wrote:

Wе аге wгіttіng tο lеt уοu кnοw thаt уοuг οгdег hаѕ Ьееn ρlасеd ѕuссеѕѕfullу.
Wе wіll ѕеnd уοu а сοnfігmаtіοn еmаіl οnсе уοuг ѕuЬѕсгіρtіοn іѕ асtіνе.
Κіndlу gο thοugh thе аttасhеd іnνοісе fοг mοге іnfοгmаtіοn аЬοut уοuг οгdег .

What's with the funny 'b's?

Wow. I just got an email from Netflix about updating my credit card information, and it looks absolutely authentic. Right logos, no misspellings, some pictures of current Netflix movies....

But my card doesn't expire until 2027.

So I took a closer look at the sending address: (friedrich.rau97946@icloud.com)

Yikes it's spam!

I have gotten and installed a few software updates in the past 90 days, and one of them (not sure which) added a wonderful new feature to AOL mail.

Now I can flag any incoming mail as "spam" and AOL automatically blocks that sender from ever coming though again. Previously I had to do that manually, and I was limited to I think 24 senders. I had to drop some old senders to add new ones.

Now apparently the sky's the limit.

I still get spam every day, but no repeat offenders.