How you can be tricked to allow spam in your inbox

There are over 145 Billion emails sent everyday and among those 100 Billion are just SPAM. Spam is a solved problem. You rarely have to worry about important emails being marked as spam. On these rare occasions when you expect to receive an email and it doesn't seem to be showing up, you make the trip to the dreaded spam folder. This is what I did this morning. After sorting through the viagra, cialis, and Nigerian princes emails, I stumbled upon an interesting email.

I use the whatsapp app alot on my phone. Sometimes I get audio messages in formats my phone doesn't support so I send them back to my email for later playback. So when I saw a message titled Voice Message from whatsapp I opened it to investigate.

Fake Whatsapp spam message

Maybe I spent more time than I should on this but it is always fun to investigate what is the latest trick spammers are using. First of all I checked what is the email address of the sender. I am assuming any whatsapp email will be from something@whatsapp.com this one was from team@powertoolbiz.webdesign.jsrweb.co.uk. After this I didn't bother checking the full header.

On the email itself nothing is clickable. The big play button doesn't do anything. But here is where the spammer is playing his trick. Right under the button it says:

* If you cannot play, move message to the "Inbox" folder.

What happens when you move this message to your inbox? You are basically saying that this message is not spam. Of course when you move the message you still can't press the button because it is just an "image". Maybe you will get frustrated, delete the email and move on. However from now the sender can now send you spam messages that will not be caught by the spam filter, because you allowed it, and show up straight in your Inbox.

I'm sure there are other kind of tricks that are used and they used the name Whatsapp because it is very popular at the moment. If you see this type of email now you know what to do... delete them.