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Ozarks Technical Community College robbed of nearly $900k

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Re: Ozarks Technical Community College robbed of nearly $900k

#71

Post by SapporoChris »

sdenton4 wrote: post #65
pphysch wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Better safeguards around privacy"? How is Google or Cloudflare or NSA or whoever peeking at your incoming emails to determine what gets through good for "privacy"? That is upside down and backwards. Please explain.

Html enabled email can easily contain tracking. Even without JavaScript, you could insert an img tag pointing at a uniquely generated address and log the query... It becomes a question of who you trust more: the service you've chosen for handling your email (and spam protection), or the people sending spam emails. If you don't trust your provider, you should find another provider.

Most email clients have the option to not autoload images.

I set my client to not autoload, it is easy enough to click to load an image if I think I want to see it. In most cases I do not!

Re: Ozarks Technical Community College robbed of nearly $900k

#72

Post by ghaff »

qiskit wrote: post #57
ghaff wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the things that I assume happens is that, even when people have explicitly signed up for something or at least not opted out of receiving updates etc., they'll just "report spam" rather than unsubscribe and when enough people do this it gets put in everyone's spam folder unless enough people reclassify it. There's not much stuff that ends up in my spam folder that I really care about and a fair bit I don't kno…

> they'll just "report spam" rather than unsubscribe I'm guessing this is a major part of it. But then again, if a legitimate service is so spammy that people will just "report as spam" rather than unsubscribing, maybe they should change their behavior.

There's definitely a continuum from I signed up for your newsletter, to I attended your event/downloaded your document and opted in, to I didn't opt out, to random mails typically semi-relevant at best from someone who got my email from some list somewhere, to outright scams/offers to sell mailing lists/etc.

Of course it depends somewhat on frequency etc. as well. I'll still mostly just unsubscribe if there's a link and usually reserve report spam for random crap that doesn't have an automated unsubscribe option.

Pre-Covid, I attended a lot of events and that's probably has led to me getting on a lot of lists. Like it or not, no small part of the event industry is for companies to get leads.

Re: Ozarks Technical Community College robbed of nearly $900k

#73

Post by Eyght »

qiskit wrote: post #57
ghaff wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the things that I assume happens is that, even when people have explicitly signed up for something or at least not opted out of receiving updates etc., they'll just "report spam" rather than unsubscribe and when enough people do this it gets put in everyone's spam folder unless enough people reclassify it. There's not much stuff that ends up in my spam folder that I really care about and a fair bit I don't kno…

> they'll just "report spam" rather than unsubscribe I'm guessing this is a major part of it. But then again, if a legitimate service is so spammy that people will just "report as spam" rather than unsubscribing, maybe they should change their behavior.

In e-commerce I've noticed that customers that request to be removed from the mailinglist and/or to have their info/account be deleted often forget about ever using the site. Then a few months later they order something and sign up for the newsletter again. When they receive their "first" newsletter they recognize the style and remember that they requested it to be cancelled, which leads to many angry emails and spam reports.

An order form with no pre-selected "join newsletter" option doesn't seem to mitigate this problem. The obvious soloution is to save the customer's email in the mailinglist as unsubscribed, but afaik that's not legal if they request an account deletion.

Re: Ozarks Technical Community College robbed of nearly $900k

#74

Post by Swizec »

Eyght wrote: post #73
qiskit wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they'll just "report spam" rather than unsubscribe I'm guessing this is a major part of it. But then again, if a legitimate service is so spammy that people will just "report as spam" rather than unsubscribing, maybe they should change their behavior.

In e-commerce I've noticed that customers that request to be removed from the mailinglist and/or to have their info/account be deleted often forget about ever using the site. Then a few months later they order something and sign up for the newsletter again. When they receive their "first" newsletter they recognize the style and remember that they requested it to be cancelled, which leads to many angry emails and spam…

My favorite problem are people who go “Never email me again about anything” then a few months later complain “Why didn’t you tell me about the new version?”

Re: Ozarks Technical Community College robbed of nearly $900k

#75

Post by ghaff »

Eyght wrote: post #73
qiskit wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they'll just "report spam" rather than unsubscribe I'm guessing this is a major part of it. But then again, if a legitimate service is so spammy that people will just "report as spam" rather than unsubscribing, maybe they should change their behavior.

In e-commerce I've noticed that customers that request to be removed from the mailinglist and/or to have their info/account be deleted often forget about ever using the site. Then a few months later they order something and sign up for the newsletter again. When they receive their "first" newsletter they recognize the style and remember that they requested it to be cancelled, which leads to many angry emails and spam…

I'm sure it depends on jurisdiction but that would presumably be saving PII after a removal request.

I find the tabs on my personal Gmail help a lot. Most of the form stuff lands in Promotions or Updates which I glance at now and then. Occasionally there's something I'm actually interested in. I used to keep a separate email for orders and the like but over time I found that just became a black hole that I never looked at.

Re: Ozarks Technical Community College robbed of nearly $900k

#77

Post by leephillips »

solenoidalslide wrote: post #12

> The loss of the funds will not affect students, classes or operations, states the release. Are organizations liable when they make statements like this? Suppose operations actually are affected and the college intentionally misrepresented the consequences of the fraud—are there grounds for legal recourse by students and future students?

If you have been harmed by the statement of the college, the legal recourse would be to sue them and bring evidence of the actual harm.

Re: Ozarks Technical Community College robbed of nearly $900k

#79

Post by vmception »

infogulch wrote: post #66
vmception wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its just different people disrupting the spam space. Someone looked at the operational assumptions of “lets target gullible people by using stupid obviously fraudulent scenarios so that we can weed out everyone who wont play along” and noticed it is missing a very large target market unnecessarily.

That almost sounds like an argument for why old school scammers are relatively ethical.

I don't know that argument.

Re: Ozarks Technical Community College robbed of nearly $900k

#80

Post by e40 »

slig wrote: post #25
civilized wrote: post #17

I feel like spammers and cyber criminals are getting better. Stuff is starting to get through Google spam filter by mashing up with elements that seem very real and urgent. Like yesterday I got this spam in my Gmail primary inbox with a subject line like "RE: Department of Education Case #295720186". It made me wonder if you could autogenerate filter-evading spam using GANs? Train a GAN to generate email that fools a…

Gmail's spam protection has been broken for ages. I'm keeping getting obvious spam (pills, eggplants emojis, money from prince kind of stuff) directly into my inbox. At the same time, legitimate email is going to the spam folder.

The "zoom" spam in Vietnamese just kills me. How does that get through??
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