Okay, I know I shouldn’t open things I am 99.95% certain are spam. But, on the other hand, a message like You credit card has been charged for $234.65 does attract one’s attention — even if the number is oddly artificial, and even if you don’t recognize the sender’s domain.
(I wish to God there was a “View Source” in Outlook. Stupid. It sounds like it’s doable in Outlook 2003 … if you tweak the registry. Stupid.)
Anyway, so I opened it up — and laughed. Because as dumb as I was to open it, there are clearly folks even more dumb: the sender, and the folks the sender expects to respond:
Important notice
We have just charged your credit card for money laundry service in amount of $234.65 (because you are either child pornography webmaster or deal with dirty money, which require us to layndry them and then send to your checking account).
If you feel this transaction was made by our mistake, please press “No”.
If you confirm this transaction, please press “Yes” and fill in the form below.
Enter your credit card number here: [______]
Enter your credit card expiration date: [_____]
[Yes] [No]
And there are some nice little contact phone numbers and an e-mail and an ICQ ID below, so it must be safe, right?
Okay, I’ve heard of this scam before, but rarely seen it so badly implemented. I mean, what’s with the typos? And, uh, guys, you want to tell the marks that they should fill out their credit card number and expiry date if they don’t want to have the charge applied. Get your scam right, okay?
Needless to say, filling out a web form like this is not recommended.
It’s like you said last week when I blogged about this sort of thing — if these guys ever learn how to spell correctly, we could be in trouble.
You can check the source code on Outlook. Right click on the message and select Options.
That will give the headers, not the contents. At least in Outlook 2002.
Dave, it sounds like you have a real problem here. Please post your credit card number and expiration date on your blog, and my team will take care of this problem immediately.
I know I’m going to get blasted here for saying this… nonetheless you CAN check it in Outlook Express. Rightclick on the message, go to properties, click on detrails tab and there’s a message source button. If OE has it I simply can’t believe Outlook doesn’t.
There is a way to “view source” in OL’02 (and not just to view the headers), but only after opening the message (or previewing it). There are two ways, in fact. One of them is such a kludge (^a,^c,^v into a wysiwyg editor like Mozilla Composer) tha it’s not practical. The other can be used by anyone with OL’02:
*right*-click in the OL’02 message after opening the message or while it’s in “preview”, and voilà — “view source” is available, and it works.
An even better alternative is to never *have* to view source separately: instead apply the registry edit to make OL’02 display all messages in plain text only, never html. Not as pretty, but safer.
Alas, plaintext would be a PITA for me, for a variety of reasons.
In Outlook 2003, though, you can use the reghack noted here to create a “View Source” option for Internet messages:
In key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\Options\Mail create a new DWORD “SaveAllMIMENotJustHeaders” with a value of 1.
At least, that’s what it says. I’ve made the change, and will check on it tomorrow.