Ken Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Why do I hate spam so much? I mean I don't get very angry at having my
> doormat filled with snailmail offers of expensive loans, plastic window
> frames and cheap mail-order garden plants. But spam like this gets me
> cross. Maybe I've come to think of my computer as in some sense more
> "mine" than my home - which would be pretty weird if true.
>
> But I still wonder what the scam is. Probably just a trawl for working
> email addresses (hit the reply button - or the "remove from out list"
> button & you are on the list for ever). But this one asks for your
> street address and home phone number - maybe for burglary?
Perhaps. There are cases where people have taken advantage of such
shady "offers," and then encountered strange people around the address
they put in (i.e. their home). This is an old meatspace trick where
the perp trolls for suckers by offering them something too good to be
true, collects or gets a means to deduce all sorts of personal
information from them (income, possessions, "do you own a big screen
TV?", etc.), then just hung around their home for a couple days to
surveil before ripping them off. $6000 or so worth of stuff isn't bad
for three days work.
>
> One wonders why anyone bothers to reply to these things. But then some
> people actually put their own credit card numbers into the "adult check"
> boxes on apparent porn sites. Even weirder.
How do such "adult check" services work, anyway? I've heard of them,
but haven't really pondered them.
I'm not particularly interested in it, but if so there are a few
attacks possible.
* If they don't actually verify the card numbers, just make stuff
up. (I'm sure they've thought of this, since it's so obvious.)
* I once heard during a discussion about such access-restriction
censorware designed to "protect the children" (but really designed
to get marketting information and turn a profit) that there's some
service out there which offers Adult-Check-like services for
free. Presumably, they gather marketting information. A
"Cypherpunks" account would be interesting for something like that.
* There's a really obvious, really big hole in this entire
scheme. It's simple. Somebody sets up a web site, throws an
"Adult Check" box on it which is really just designed to collect the
number and then grant access to give the illusion of a
normally-functioning site. There are enough people out there who are
stupid enough to put their credit card numbers into untrusted sites,
as you point out. I figure people are even less conscious about
where they put such authentication numbers. I'd be very surprised if
this _isn't_ a very common practice.
Aside from the curiosity of how such a system works and how it can be
broken, I just really despite such bullshit under the guise (lie) of
"protect the children." Anybody with more than two functioning neurons
knows that things like "adult check" aren't to "protect the children."
(And protect them from what? But that's a topic for another day.)
