spam tags

I have a few heuristics for immediate trashing that are based on dodgy IP ranges and/or subject including certain drug names (and suppliers I have fallen out with because they spam me incessantly).

I don't get many spams of the same type as you do and I do correspond with people who seem to use "!" or "!!!" on the end to mean "urgent".

Random sampled text to try and beat Bayesian spam classifiers.

The next guy will get something like

" hot. Aardvark soup tastes like?"

Much more likely to be tagged as "urgent" (or "not urgent" for that matter), too.

Tim

-- Seven Transistor Labs, LLC Electrical Engineering Consultation and Contract Design Website:

Most of the spam I get these days are somewhat well-executed phishing scams where they try to get you to click on a link from a very official looking email from FedEx or something saying you missed a package

How long until robocalls are able to leverage chatbot technology to scam you out of personal info through conversation? Already it seems like there may be a couple in the wild that can adapt canned responses to what you say when you pick up the phone

Or click unsubscribe

You haven't heard of Alexa?

I fear those the most - although the ISP side adaptive mail filters are pretty good at weeding most of them out some do get through - and if I am waiting for a delivery and they happen to hit the right courier I might in a hurry click on one. They are excellent forgeries now.

All cold calls are presumed hostile until proved otherwise.

The one that really gets my goat is when my bank rings me up unsolicited (to try and sell me something to my disadvantage) and demands that I prove to them who *I* am. We deadlock immediately since I demand they tell me the first line of my address to prove who they are and they respond that they cannot do that for data protection reasons.

My final position is if it is so urgent then ring me back when you have figured out how to prove that you are *my* bank and not some scammer. They sound really hurt that I don't trust them.

Or as my friend calls her "she who must not be named". It wakes up on anything that sounds vaguely like Alexa - Alexander, Axle etc.

Voice recognition has come on a long way. I recall playing with an early one that had to be trained to a persons voice to stand any chance at all. Alexa will work OK even with quite accented English.

I explicitly turn off all ISP filters on the valid principle that they don't know what /I/ regard as spam, and false positives can be bloody annoying.

OTOH I've trained my Seamonkey so that I can count the number of mistakes (+ve or -ve) per year on the fingers of one hand.

My bank rarely makes that mistake now. Other potential suppliers do make the mistake, though.

I ask them for "something only your company would know", and I'm liberal about what I accept, on the rare occasion they can do that.

Banks of all companies should understand the basics of security. That they sometimes truly don't is... a bit mind boggling.

NT

Why should a bankers be hurt when you don't trust them. That should be anybody?s normal reaction to them. Is there any difference between a scammer and a banker?

y sometimes truly don't is... a bit mind boggling.

Why? I was once a member of a group of small businesses in Cambridge that g ot together once a month to hear talks from potentially useful people. One of them was a bank manager, and somebody asked him what sort of training he 'd had to get his job, and it turned out to be a kind of apprenticeship - o ther bankers had told him what they had done in particular circumstances.

This didn't provide much of basis in security. Around 1980 Donald Davies wa s trying to add public key encryption to the Teletex protocol (which was in tended to replace Telex/TWX with something well-defined that worked very li ke e-mail, and did work that way in Germany and Sweden in the 1980's, to so me extent) and I got involved with him (because I knew my way around the Te letex protocol).

He was rather scathing about banks - they thought that because their data l inks were over private twisted pair that they hired from the PTT, they didn 't have to worry about security. The idea that anybody could tap those link s or insert bogus messages was not one that he could get over to them.

which he was writing at the time, doesn't spell this out - he didn't want t o put off the people who were doing most of the electronic funds transfers.

n a scammer

Scammers want to rip you off big-time, once. Bankers want to rip you off on a small scale on a regular basis. They mostly avoid killing the goose that lays the golden eggs, because you can always take your business to another bank (who will also rip you off, but only a percent here and a percent the re).

Speech recognition without training and with varying accents is much easier if no one cares about false positives. ;-)

My wife just had a case where she deposited cash at a foreign CU and they screwed up the account number (something about trailing zeroes, or something similar). When she called the home CU about it, it was pretty easy to back out the transaction but in the process she was told the name of the person who got the money. Now their account number, name, and address was compromised. *BIG* mess because some moron at the bank 1) told my wife that the money went into an active account, 2) what that account number was and 3) the name on the account. I'm sure they were happy that their account number had to be changed, and all that goes with it.

What is the problem of knowing a bank account number and associated name and address? I have a whole list of such info in my online banking account, for all the (european) accounts I have transferred money to in the past years, and those that transferred money to me. That does not give me any access to their accounts!

I understand that in the USA this might be different. A while ago I asked someone's bank account number to transfer some money to him, and he refused to give it because that would somehow give me access to his bank account. I don't understand this at all. Is there no concept of authentication and authorization on USA bank accounts???

That cannot be true... or if it is, it qualifies the banking system in the USA as completely insecure.

They don't though - at least not when cold calling to sell you stuff.

If it hadn't gone to an active account it should have bounced.

It does it you are devious enough (and professional fraudsters are).

Jeremy Clarkson famously like you believed that knowing bank account numbers didn't allow much chance of fraud and had to admit tail between legs that he had been made to donate to charity.

So even in the UK it is wise not to give you bank account details away to random strangers.

Their system has always seemed arcane from a European view.

Flakey would be my take on it. UK isn't that much better we still have paper cheques even though chip & PIN has been around for a while. Belgium did away with cheques in favour of direct money transfer well before the start of this new millennium.

ISTR there once was a US scam where cheques were printed with a magnetic ink routing to one branch and a different visual sorting address resulting them going around and around without ever clearing.

Yes and yes.

Over here, when you want to send someone money, you need his account number and name. And preferably address. Well, at least until the mighty EU stepped in and declared that it should be sufficient to know only the account number and not the name. Of course this removed the possibility to check if you are really using the correct number, so now the option to add name has been returned and it is used as an extra check (so fraudsters cannot so easily trick you into sending money to the wrong account).

What I don't understand is how an account number and name gives any withdrawal access to a bank account. For that, you need at least a card and pincode here.

I presume the cheques are there to hold up an "anonimity" layer between the sender and receiver of the money. Here, you just transfer money to the account of a company, your friend, family or whoever without using a cheque. You setup a transfer with amount, destination account number and name, and optional description and it is transferred to the account, with the receiver getting the source account number and name plus the description. Because of that, there is no low-cost cheque mechanism in place and sending money by cheque will set you back 20-30 dollars in handling cost at least.

In the Netherlands, cheques for inter-bank transfers have not been used for at least 50 years now. The use of "guaranteed cheques" as payment in stores (a system I think has never existed in the USA) has ceased at least 25 years ago.

But back to the topic, is it really possible to withdraw money from an account when you know account number and name? What would be the mechanism to do that? How do you keep your bank account number secret?

Dead giveaway detectors for SPAM includes:

1A) ANY email that contains the word "Greetings".

3) Emails that arrive multiple times in my inbox - one for each email account.

5) Emails that start off with, "if you can't view this in your browser...", then even if you are a legit email, I have no desire to be bothered by your laziness! Learn HTML. It isn't that difficult.