From 6:12 pm to 6:43 pm last Thursday, I received 650 spam emails. They were not from the same source, and were not technically spam. They included legitimate newsletters from the University of Texas, the Montreal Opera, and the Obama Foundation. The most disturbing was from a newsletter from USconcealweapons where an idiot praised Kyle Wittenhouse and our judicial system. A lot were selling lighting fixtures.
My first thought was that I was being pranked, but found through a few sites that I was the victim of a ‘spam’ or ‘email’ bomb. For the low price of $15, an instigator can put the victim’s email address onto a dark web site. (Source Appriver) The site has a ‘bot’ that sends the address out to thousands of websites that are seeking people to sign up for their newsletters. The sites without “sign-up verification”, what we see as “I am not a robot” check boxes, immediately send out “Thanks for signing up for our newsletter” emails to the victim’s in-box.
The reasons that someone would do this vary, but in my case it was to cover up credit card fraud. They wanted to bury something in a deluge of emails. The third email in the deluge was a receipt from a barely-existent company called Made2Travel for $2280 that had both my email and the last 4 digits of my credit card, but no mention of a product purchase. I checked my account and found a $2280 charge on my card that went out the same time as the spam bomb. Made2Travel, as nears as I can tell, is owned by a shell company that is owned by a shell company operating out of the exact same office in Tampa, Florida and has no internet site. (Thanks DeSantis!)
So I was quick enough that the payment did not go through, cancelled the card before it could get used again, and filed a claim with the FBI (no response). As far as I know, the bad guys did not get their $2280 and lost $15 on the dark web. But I now have the fun job of hitting the “Unsubscribe” button on about 50 emails per day.
What I cannot figure out, and perhaps here my fellow DKers can help me out, is why Made2Travel, being as sketchy as they are, would send me a receipt? I check my email much more frequently than my credit card account. By sending the receipt and then the spam bomb, the perps tipped me off to something nefarious which I was able to stop. Had they not sent the spam bomb, they probably could have used the credit card a few more times.