Earthling

Note: The below is an archived entry from Earthling, formerly EarthLink's official blog. The blog itself has been decommissioned and is no longer updated, and comments are trackbacks are no longer accepted.

Starting some time over the weekend, I saw large amounts of spam in the Junk Mail folders of various accounts that fit a definite pattern, all rolling in in batches. Have you seen a bunch of spam with the subject line "So and so wrote:" with nothing after the colon, and a first name that matches the "from" field of the e-mail in question? I'm seeing a whole mess of them. I guess the spammers figure that that subject line tying back into the from field will get them past junk filters.

Judging by the content, they appear to be all part of the same stock pump-and-dump scam where scammers try to artificially inflate a stock price, and then get their money out quickly. There's a great discussion and explanation of this type of scheme on Ask Metafilter.

I asked EarthLink spam sleuth Mary Youngblood about the new pattern this morning, and she said it's likely to be one ring or group of spam rings behind it. Spam patterns have helped our fraud and abuse team to bust many organized groups of spammers over the years, including a phisher scam indictment in September.