Re: Email Scams, Telemarketing, and Identity Theft

["Marcus J. Ranum" <mjr () ranum com>]

Sam Golden wrote:
 > I have had my home phone number in the National Do Not Call Registry,
> https://www.donotcall.gov/, since it's inception and I have received few 
> if any telemarketing phone calls.
>  
> Within the last week, however, I have received more than a dozen calls.  
> After brushing the first few off, I became curious and started to ask 
> the callers why they were calling me.  The results were startling.
>  
> Each of the first three callers I asked stated that they had received an 
> email from me requesting that they call me.  Knowing that I hadn't done 
> so, I asked for the email address.  They stated they received an email 
> from Goldensaaaa () gmail com <mailto:Goldensaaaa () gmail com>.  This 
> apparently legitimizes their calling me.

Want to guess who sent it to them?

There's cut-outs in most spam/telemarketing laws that say you
can request calls or that it's OK if there's a "prior business
relationship."  It usually takes the telemarketers a few
months to figure out a way around each new law. After all,
their important message is, um, important.

After thinking it over for a few years (seriously) I've
concluded that spam and telemarketing are OK and I will
accept any amount of them as long as I still have free
speech. I don't, of course - in the US there are considerable
laws curtailing same (see 18 US 2257a for example) and the
FBI spends a lot of time and taxpayers' money going
after certain kinds of speech rather than others that
fall under the same laws. So, with spam and telemarketing
we're dealing with a social failure; the police won't
protect us and we are not given the tools to protect
ourselves. (And the phone companies will cheerfully
sell us caller-ID but then sell telemarketers the ability
to block it)  Ultimately, this kind of imbalance will
continue as long as it's profitable.


> Now, while telemarketing is annoying, it started me thinking about the 
> implications.  Anyone can search various public archives such as 411.com 
> <http://411.com> and find a phone number for a name.  Anyone can create 
> a gmail account as long as they can read the "captcha".  Is some "evil" 
> telemarketing company hiring lots of people to generate lots of mail 
> accounts and then offer these to faux-legitimize telemarketing phone calls?


Yes. That's probably what's happening. Although the
telemarketers may simply optimize by not bothering
to do it, until someone complains - THEN - send the
"please call me" fake email.


> Should I be paranoid?

Was that a serious question? I checked the date of your
post and it wasn't April 1. Did you seriously ask the
firewall-wizards if you should be paranoid?

The answer is, "of course not!" It's not paranoia
if you've ALREADY got a brain-leech installed in you
and the orbital mind control lasers are making you
dance like a puppet.

mjr.
--
Marcus J. Ranum         CSO, Tenable Network Security, Inc.
                        http://www.tenablesecurity.com
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