More spam, this time from... somewhere other than the usual.

[Big Frank]

I got a spam email that said it was from "cookie 62" at a gmail address. I didn't think it was cookie62 from the forum, but  think her may have been hacked. Instead of deleting it like I normally do with spam, I opened the link https:// t.co/ JpbyYraqqb in a new private window. It led to a site with a .cc domain. That's a new one to me. They were selling medicine online. I didn't pay much attention to it, but they were selling Viagra and other stuff. The Cocos (Keeling) Islands, officially the Territory of Cocos (Keeling) Islands, are an Australian external territory in the Indian Ocean, comprising a small archipelago approximately midway between Australia and Sri Lanka and relatively close to the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Northern Cyprus, officially the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), is a de facto state that comprises the northeastern portion of the island of Cyprus. It is recognized only by Turkey, and its territory is considered by all other states to be part of the Republic of Cyprus.

On the Internet, .cc is the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, an Australian territory. It is administered by a United States company, VeriSign, through a subsidiary company, eNIC, which promotes it for international registration as "the next .com". The .cc domain was originally assigned to eNIC in October 1997 by the IANA; eNIC manages the TLD alongside SamsDirect Internet.

The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus also uses the .cc domain, along with .nc.tr. Google treats .cc as a generic top-level domain (gTLD) because "users and website owners frequently see [the domain] as being more generic than country-targeted."

Registration is made directly at second-level.

The TLD is preferred by many cricket and cycling clubs, as well as churches and Christian organizations, since "CC" can be an abbreviation for "Christian Church" or "Catholic Church". Some open-source/open-hardware projects, such as the Arduino project, use a .cc for their home pages, since "CC" is also the abbreviation for "Creative Commons", whose licenses are used in the projects. Business owners in Southern Massachusetts are rapidly adopting Cape Cod CC domains for local identity. Canadian Club whiskey has also used .cc domains for marketing purposes.[citation needed] It is also used for some community colleges, though other domains, such as .edu, are more popular.

Issues

In 2016, the Anti-Phishing Working Group stated that the .cc, .com, .pw, and .tk domain names account for 75% of all malicious domain registrations.

Second level domains

gov.cu.cc, com.cc, net.cc, edu.cc, org.cc

A number of second-level domain names are also maintained by CoCCA, including "com.cc", "net.cc", "edu.cc", and "org.cc".
cc.cc, co.cc, cu.cc, cz.cc

These are not official hierarchies of .cc, but domains owned by companies who offer free subdomain registration.
co.cc

The co.cc URL has been known to host spammers, who create spam blogs, or "splogs", often with nonsense names. Due to such spamming, in July 2011 Google removed over 11 million .co.cc websites from its search results. Legitimate sites (per Google's Webmaster Guidelines) on the .co.cc subdomain could send a reconsideration request to Google to have their specific site excluded from the ban.

The abundance of cheap .co.cc domains had also been used by those who sold fake "anti-virus" programs.

From 2012 to 2014, the co.cc website and name servers were not online. There was no formal statement by the company, but they did stop accepting new registrations some time before they closed.

In 2018, co.cc was listed for sale for US$500,000.00. As of 2019, co.cc is registered to and in use by another entity.

[Big Frank]

Two more spam emails from "cookie 62" today.

[Big Frank]

And another. There's no telling how long this will go on. If you don't reply to the first one, they might think you'll reply to the hundredth. That's happening with other spam emails. I'll get multiple emails from the same place, but if  hover my pointer over "from" they may actually all come from different addresses, none of them being who it says it's from.

[Big Frank]

I got a few more spam emails today from cookie 62 and they all came from different gmail addresses. If the email filters at Comcast worked right they would be blocking all email from gmail and hotmail. I don't know anyone with a gmail address which is what most of the spammers use. And I don't know anyone other than myself with a hotmail account, which most of the other spammers use. All email I get from either one is 100% spam. I tried using the email filter, if the address contains... mark as spam and delete, but it doesn't work for gmail or hotmail.

[Big Frank]

I got a couple of phishing emails today from domains I didn't recognize. One was .me. Montenegro, please! Another was from .la. Those Laosy b*******s. And a bunch of the usual suspects too. They just don't stop. I don't read them or reply to them, so they don't send the same exact thing again. They send more crap from a different fake email address the next day. And another fake account the day after that. Hanging is too good for these thieves. If some of these people were caught and impaled in public as a warning, maybe the rest of them would take notice and think twice about their phishing activities.

[Sponsor]

[Diamondback]

I got a few more spam emails today from cookie 62 and they all came from different gmail addresses. If the email filters at Comcast worked right they would be blocking all email from gmail and hotmail. I don't know anyone with a gmail address which is what most of the spammers use. And I don't know anyone other than myself with a hotmail account, which most of the other spammers use. All email I get from either one is 100% spam. I tried using the email filter, if the address contains... mark as spam and delete, but it doesn't work for gmail or hotmail.

Um, I use Gmail, but when I send email it's only to users I've exchanged email addy's with via DM and made sure they whitelist me first.

Gmail, Hotmail/Live and Yahoo - spammers love them some freemail to do their crap.

[alfsauve]

I get these Urgent your xxx account has been charged with $nnnnn if this isn’t correct then click on the link.

Sometimes, I actually do have an account at xxx but half the time I don’t.  Also when you get two or three at the same time for different accounts…. Duh. 

And I guess a lot of people don’t fully understand, but Wells Fargo, Target, any big name company will not have a return email address at gmail.com

[Big Frank]

Um, I use Gmail, but when I send email it's only to users I've exchanged email addy's with via DM and made sure they whitelist me first.

Gmail, Hotmail/Live and Yahoo - spammers love them some freemail to do their crap.

You got that right! I get a lot of stuff that says it's from some college or university and has a .edu domain, or something lie that. But it's mostly stuff from places that don't exist unless they're on the dark web. Of all the free email addresses sending spam and phishing emails, it seems like it's 99% Gmail. Once in awhile there's a Live or Microsoft, but not Hotmail.

[Big Frank]

I get these Urgent your xxx account has been charged with $nnnnn if this isn’t correct then click on the link.

Sometimes, I actually do have an account at xxx but half the time I don’t.  Also when you get two or three at the same time for different accounts…. Duh. 

And I guess a lot of people don’t fully understand, but Wells Fargo, Target, any big name company will not have a return email address at gmail.com

And stuff from PayPal will have a PayPal address. When I do look at these emails it almost always says my payment was approved for some Bitcoin I bought, usually for around $600. I forward the fake PayPal email to phishing@paypal.com and they immediately send me an email thanking me. I like letting them try to figure out who it is, instead of just deleting it.