Blogging for the Dark Side

This weekend I got a piece of e-mail that I thought was going to be an attempt at phishing, and I opened it expecting to quickly hit the "Report Phishing" doo-dad in Gmail.

But it didn’t contain a phishing appeal in the text of the e-mail itself. (You know, all those Nigeria/wherever variants on The Spanish Prisoner). Instead, it contained a link to a blog on Blogspot.

Ostensibly, the e-mail was from the pastor of a church in another country who had set up a blog and was inviting me to read it, but the e-mail still threw off phishing vibes to me even though there was no appeal for money in the e-mail itself.

So I clicked on the link and took a look at the blog.

I found what appeared to be the blog of a pastor in another country. Yet the way the thing was written and the way it re-used photographs kept my spider sense tingling and, sure enough, sandwiched in to various blog posts were appeals for financial support, and something in my brain said: "Two-step phishing routine; phishers may start sending out innocent-seeming e-mails as bait to get people to sites where traditional phishing is carried out."

Now, I don’t know for sure that this wasn’t legit. It may be that this really as the blog of a pastor in another country, who is innocently asking for donations.

Which is why I’m not naming the site. I don’t want to falsely accuse someone who is legitimate.

But just coincidentally, later that day, I happened to run into

THIS STORY ABOUT BLOGSPOT BEING INFECTED WITH PHISHING AND MALWARE-SPREADING BLOGS.

Be careful out there, folks.

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

17 thoughts on “Blogging for the Dark Side”

  1. If I remember correctly, you may have received a similar message in your comboxes last week.
    I don’t recall where it was, but I remember thinking that it had the same generic quality to it that you mentioned, and that it was directing readers to a blog to find out more about the bloggers efforts to save some poor, foreign boy.
    Now, it could be on the up-and-up, but it smelled funny.

  2. Ah, yet another example of the internet transforming itself a seedy, red-light district of a decaying city.

  3. What’s weird is that when I loaded the new Internet Explorer 7.0 and, then, visited JA.O, its Phishing Filter had actually identified it as a phishing site!

  4. Ah, yet another example of the internet transforming itself a seedy, red-light district of a decaying city.
    Transforming? Isn’t that how it started out?

  5. Go to my website where I’ll give you, for a nominal fee of $24,817.43, the home addresses of ALL of the internet’s spammers.

  6. Ah, yet another example of the internet transforming itself a seedy, red-light district of a decaying city
    Transforming? Isn’t that how it started out?
    Nope.

  7. Transforming? Isn’t that how it started out?
    Nope.

    It appears somebody actually knows the story!
    FINALLY!

  8. Tim,
    I think I know the one you’re talking about – a man who is trying to adopt an Ethiopian boy. I’ve been to the site and it looks plausible, though of course it’s hard to know for sure. I haven’t seen any outright fund appeals, just requests for prayers.

  9. Tim, there weren’t any when it was posted on Jimmy’s blog. The posts asking if anyone could help out are since then.
    Anyway, it really didn’t look like a scam. It lacked a lot of the sympathy-grabbing characteristics of a scam. Scamsters don’t tend to write blogs about difficult teenagers. Wouldn’t recommend handing out money to anyone you don’t know, or haven’t checked out, though.

  10. Some Daughters of St. Paul (FSP) sisters have also posted blogs on Blogger where they petition for money. I’m not saying that they may not indeed need money, it’s that anyone can sew a habit from a costume catalogue and petition the gullible for money.

  11. I’ve got to agree with Tim. I’ve noticed that blog “advertized” as it were on three blogs via the comboxes. One widely-read Catholic blogger posted a link and was contacted again a couple of times by the guy with links to banner ads and the like. I looked over the “African Orphan” blog myself after reading this post yesterday. While I didn’t see any direct “send $” requests, the later posts all seemed to end in a vague plea for the reader’s help. I’d be very wary of making email contact with the guy.
    Sorry Eileen, but while the blog wasn’t overlty emotional, there was plenty in there that struck me as calculated to tug at the emotions of the reader. Moreover, a lot of what is written there just doesn’t seem to me to pass the “how would I go about it if I were in this situation?” test. I’ll admit that there seems to be a lot of work going into the blog, and that there have got to be easier ways to make a living. But then, I don’t know what the average payoff from such scams is.

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