When social network invites are used for Nigerian/419 scams
In the last few days, we starting seeing a new wave of Nigerian/419 fraud messages coming from the social network site Ning.com. No, these are not the typical “Hi friend come join my network” invites. While many people may consider friend invites from social networks to be unwanted, the messages we have seen have scam content embedded within the custom invite:
The message body of these messages contains typical Nigerian/419 scam content about fund transfer/inheritance/remittance/etc. Of course, this was not the first time we noticed an invitation service has been abused for Nigerian/419 scams. I blogged about similar abuse of Yahoo Calender! last year. Furthermore, the question is not whether scammers will abuse these services. It’s rather which service they will choose to abuse next. Users can only hope that social network/free web service providers are able to implement measures to reduce or eliminate this kind of abuse.
Posted on March 12th, 2009 by SavioL, SophosLabs, CanadaFiled under: General
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