Jye

Recently I've been getting a few scam banking emails, the usual rubbish. So far I've had a few claiming to be from the Halifax, the Woolwich etc, all are along the lines of:

"Dear Client of Halifax Internet banking, technical services at the bank are carrying out a planned software upgrade, blah, blah. We earnestly ask you to visit the following link and to confirm your bank data."

Love the 'earnest' bit, they all seem to contain such 'sincere' wording

Now the bit I dont get, they usually contain weird hidden (white on white) text, like:

"Jennifer Lopez Winamp in 1919 Buffy the Vampire Slayer Online” and other nonsence. Today I got another cracker, purporting to be from wamu.com with a hidden message stating:

"Keep well! mamma but... Yahoo Midi in 1989 Swimming Pools I'll wait you I am sorry to deal with you Spice Girls in 1811 to deal with you in 1929 MIRC Where is the Brittany Murphy: Religion divides Just tonight in 2002 Costumes and if you in 1962 Surfing"

So, anyone know what the hidden text messages are all about then?

lightning101

Been ******** any nigerians in the local area ?

hedgehog

To get them through spam mail detecting software which often looks at the content of mail to decide what to bin. Clearly if there are a lot of random interesting words in there then it can't risk binning the mail. It also means that the mails can all contain different "hidden" text and so appear different to anything hunting spam on the text.

Jye

Yeah, I get the choice Nigerian wording, just dont get the crazy hidden text

Jye

Ah, cheers hedgehog. I will sleep easy tonight now, heh

Kieran_Burns

iTrader: (1)

Spam filters like Mailsweep work on a scoring system... +xx% for spam like phrases and -xx% for non spam phrases...

So the phishers think that if they embed enough non spam phrases in the e-mail it lowers the score and it gets through... like yours did.

Scooby-Doo

WAMU is the Washington Mutual bank and I keep receing "their" emails as well as a few from Lloyds.