Anyway

My pre­vi­ous post on scams was writ­ten without tak­ing into account a rather more dis­turb­ing devel­op­ment in the spam/scam scene. I recently received spam that claimed to have lots of cred­it card num­bers for sale, prices vary­ing accord­ing to the issu­ing coun­try and how many card num­bers you wanted. I went to the web site and there were lots of cards there (middle digits miss­ing). I checked for my card num­ber, which was­n’t there. There was no list­ing of Cana­dian cred­it card num­bers, so there is some­thing to be said for not liv­ing in the neigh­bour­hood’s biggest country.

This is so blatant, and, unlike the phish­ing scams, is some­thing the cred­it card com­pan­ies should be dir­ectly inter­ested in stop­ping since the money to cov­er fraud­u­lent card use comes out of their profits. Unless… maybe the email was a scam, and some­body is fish­ing to find people who want to buy such num­bers. Lots of scope for con­spir­acy the­or­ies there!