The New York Grapevine, Garbage Spam and Phishing Scams! western union spam, phishing scams, yahoo.com.hk, windows live hotmail

Garbage Spam and Phishing Scams!
by Harvey Wallbangers
Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011
New York, NY
Views: 10,401

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Garbage Spam and Phishing Scams: Western Union is now using Yahoo.com.hk & Windows Live/Hotmail doesn't fuck around!

As a tech guy, I usually just delete Spam like the one I recently received claiming that I had, and I quote : " $2.8millions united state dollars in atm payment card to be sent me through western union money transfer payemtn.."

Of course its an identity thief trying to scam me as you can see from the email below, this is pretty much garbage and most people out there should just delete this type of junk mail without even opening it.

BUT, me being the invincible tech guy that I am (I am a legend in my own mind), I decided I was tired of having to delete all this junk coming from other domains with references to Yahoo.com.hk within the same Western Union Phishing scam.

Part of my daily duties working for a hosting provider includes dealing with abuse and Spam on behalf of our hosting clients and this one spam looked similar across for some reason caught my eye, so rather than submit it to our SpamCop account, I decided to submit it directly to abuse@yahoo.com.hk as an average Joe just to see what would happen...

So I forwarded the email intact (with the offending spam as an attachment to preserve headers) to abuse@yahoo.com.hk - and asked them to deal with an account that was clearly created for one purpose - identity theft and phishing scams.

It took a couple of days, but Yahoo.com.hk's abuse department eventually contacted me with a long winded bullshit email about not being able to see the headers in attachments because they do not accept attachments, blah, blah, blah...

I was pissed to say the least. Clearly the headers weren't even needed to prove the email account westernunion_office71 @ yahoo.com.hk was running a phishing and identity theft scam.
The blatantly long email had nothing to do with the fact that I was getting multiple spams with this email in them.

Finally the correct way to present this to Yahoo.com.hk dawned on me; "Why the fuck would Western Union need a Yahoo account in Hong Kong?" Surely Yahoo! can't dispute that simple fact.

If anything, Yahoo! should have filters in their account creation process to eliminate the usage of proprietary names like Citibank or Western Union or variations thereof to protect themselves and their users as well as bolstering their own credibility.

It wouldn't take more than a couple of hours to implement a simple comparison dictionary of disallowed strings into their system to prevent users from creating accounts that spoof legitimate financial institutions.

So I shot off this response because I wasn't about to put another minute into Yahoo.com.hk's bs header request.

To which I received this final reply from Yahoo! Hong Kong

Needless to say, the account has finally been deleted (Yahoo! HK won't tell you what action they take), but I tried emailing it again and I received a bounceback, so it's gone now.

How Does Windows Live/Hotmail deal with this same issue???

Curiosity eating away at me, I decided to see how Windows Live/Hotmail would deal with the average Joe sending spam to abuse@hotmail.com and what I found is that Microsoft doesn't fuck around.
I received an email response within 1 day stating that the offending account had been deleted. End of story. Thanks Yaypee from Windows Live Hotmail Abuse Team! You guys ROCK.