Microsoft, Yahoo In Alliance To Combat Lottery Scams

[engine]

Microsoft, Yahoo In Alliance To [pcworld.com]Combat Lottery Scams

Microsoft and Yahoo have formed a group with two other partners to give law enforcement a hand in stopping bogus lottery scams and educating Internet surfers.

Microsoft and Yahoo have seen increasing amounts of e-mail using their brand names to convince unwitting users they've won a lottery. The scammers then instruct victims to pay fees in order to collect their winnings, a scam known as advance fee fraud.

Joining those companies is the African Development Bank, whose brand is also abused, and Western Union, whose wire transfer services are frequently used in the scams.

[lexipixel]

I have wondered for along time why major mail providers can't filter / kills bulk spam. I would think that as soon as a slew of emails with similar or identical footprints that hit on 2,3 or more known spam, phishing, fraud indicators come through the profile of the email could get added to a centralized blacklist and canned.

Wordpress's Akismet does this with a +99% accuracy rate on comment spam to Wordpress blogs.

The way I see it working, is the filter traps the email, and instead sends the intended recipient a "warning" email, e.g.-

"A message from [e-mail] attempted to send you an email which contained:

- URLs with numeric IP address
- mismatched invalid addresses in sender host
- known patterns of spam / phishing language
- generic body text known to be sent to multiple users
- routing form countries you have chosen not to receive email from
- etc..

Why is spam and phishing still a problem in 2008?

[jsinger]

Why is spam and phishing still a problem in 2008?

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phishing is still a problem but other spam levels are way off.

[solidcore]

and here was me thinkin i won the national lottery every month? =]

I find scam emails hilarious because I can detect them, not quite sure about the average joe or mom or dad.