Phishing and Mule spamclouds
Like a lot of people, unfortunately we get a LOT of spam. I thought it would be interesting to sort these into distinct groups and make some wordclouds , or more specifically spamclouds from the content of the spam.
The idea behind these spamclouds is that a quick glance draws your eye to the more dominant words, and also gives a sense of the relative importance of words used in each spam type.
I sorted the spam from around 3-6 months worth of data into 3 distinct groups as follows:
Phishing spam: These are emails claiming to be from a legitimate institution, such as the tax office, bank, ISP or credit union. They attempt to dupe victims into handing over their banking details, and other data that could be used in many forms of identity theft. For the purpose of this exercise I concentrated on emails purporting to be from Australian based institutions. The word Commonwealth stands out due to the fact that the Commonwealth Bank of Australia have been the target of a large amount of phishing attacks recently. Read more about this style of scam at the Scamwatch website here.
Money mule spam: These are emails that attempt to recruit people into become "money mules" for the purpose of laundering stolen funds. Often the victim believes they are partaking in legitimate activity, such as a new job as a transfer agent, where their pay is a small percentage of each 'transfer'. Read more about this style of scam here.
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Advance Fee Fraud spam: Also known (quite unfairly) as "Nigerian Scams" or "419" scams. Read more about this style of scam here.
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I was initially going to do medication/viagra spam as a category as well. However the words that are typically used in the majority of these emails are just so bizarre and nonsensical, that the spamcloud would probably be quite humorous, but not really useful.
Now, obviously the results will vary with different datasets and time periods, so please don't read too much into this piece of work, it's not overly scientific, but hopefully it is still useful and instructive to the public.
We recommend anyone thinking they (or someone they know) may have fallen for one of these scams to check out the Scamwatch website http://www.scamwatch.gov.au. This is a very useful resource for the public to learn about many types of scam, and is run by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC).