Friday, March 23, 2012

Tagged Spam Links to Pharmacy Websites

TaggedHave you noticed a lot of Tagged spam arriving in your inbox lately?

Spammers are now spoofing message notifications from the social networking site in order to drive traffic to a variety of illegal pharmacy sites.

At first glance, the spam message looks as if it was really sent from Tagged; the company logo is on the top left with convincing site links on the right, a fake message from an alleged Tagged member occupies the center of the message body with a big orange button welcoming you to read the full message and an official looking footer rounds out the bottom of the email:

Tagged Spam



Subject: Angela C sent you a message...
From: Tagged (tagged@taggedmail.com)

Tagged   My Profile | Messages | Friends | Meet Me | Browse | Search

Angela C, 23
You have a new message!

Angela C says: Hi, do you remember me? Can you...
View message!

Manage my account and email settings on Tagged Inc., 110 Pacific Mall Box #117, San Francisco, CA. 94111

All Tagged emails will be sent from our official @tagged.com or @taggedmail.com domains to your registered email address. We will never contact you from any other email addresses.

However, none of the embedded links point to Tagged.com, but a pharmacy site instead.

The fact that spammers opted to send fraudulent Tagged emails is ironic in itself, considering Tagged, Inc. has quite the checkered past involving deceptive bulk email practices resulting huge fines and being labeled the “World’s Most Annoying Website” by Time’s Sean Gregory.

Still, I’m sure none of that matters to cybercrooks and so they’ll just add fuel to the fire by continuing to drag Tagged’s name in the mud just to trick people into visiting pharmacy sites.

Let’s just hope they don’t start directing users to malicious sites instead.

If you happen to receive a message that claims to be from Tagged, make sure you take a moment to hover your mouse over the links to view the destination URL before clicking on it. If the URL doesn’t match, feel free to delete the email.

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