Friday, March 26, 2021

A BLOG WARNING FROM COYOTE

Taken from Coyote
March 25, 2021, 5:29 pm We have gotten scores of variations on this message in the last 2 weeks from our public contact form -- someone is beating our Captcha, probably just by hiring people in low-wage countries to manually do them. I have not tried it, but I would sooner have unprotected sex with 20 random people than click on the link (I X'ed out part of the link to avoid anyone screwing up and doing so). That link is not a web site but a file programmed to download that probably isn't designed to improve your computer's operation.

Hi,

This is Melaenis and I am a qualified photographer.

I was baffled, frankly speaking, when I recognised my images at your website. If you use a copyrighted image without an owner's license, you should be aware that you could be sued by the creator.

It's illegal to use stolen images and it's so сheap!

Take a look at this document with the links to my images you used at camprrm.com and my earlier publications to get the evidence of my ownership.

Download it right now and check this out for yourself:

https://sites.google.com/view/id98430927432698768/home/drive/storage/file/download?FileID=8343XXXXX3081562342 [it is a clickable link in the email]

If you don't delete the images mentioned in the document above within the next couple of days, I'll file a to your hosting provider stating that my copyrights have been severely infringed and I am trying to protect my intellectual property.

And if it doesn't work, trust me I am going to report and sue you! And I will not bother myself to let you know of it in advance.

It is actually sort of a brilliant come-on, given that most small website owners are sloppy about what images they grab for their site and probably have some latent sense of guilt on this score.

People imagine hackers doing clever electronic things to break into systems, and some times that is the case. But more often than not -- and this is true all the way back to the early phone phreaks -- they crack systems by social engineering, convincing some rube on the inside to give up a password or click on a bad link.
Better safe than sorry. Also, just what the hell is a 'qualified photographer?' Is that some jackass that graduated from the Lord Snowden Academy of picture arts or just some other bogus qualification like Dr. Jills or Dr. Fauccis?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

if you search for that first phrase in your favorite search engine you'll see that this is a phishing scam. for a specific example, search for the sentence and add: site:cornell.edu to see their warning about this same scam that has been going on for 4+ months.

HMS Defiant said...

I believe that is what I said. It is a phishing scam designed to trap the unwary who are not savvy enough to stay out of every trap.

Matthew Noto said...

Scam. The giveaway is "qualified photographer" which indicates a foreign origin, as photographers in some nations have to be licensed by the state.

Matthew W said...

"Melaenis sound like the sister of the guy that claims he installed spyware on my computer and has "compromising" video of me from the nasty websites I go to and for just 1/6 of a bitcoin, he will fix my computer.
No thanks

OldAFSarge said...

Heh, "qualified photographer." The scammers aren't really that bright, are they. Of course, neither are their prey.