Spams Without Links to Spamvertised URLs

Is there anything that can be done about the following types of spam described below?

They very rarely, if ever, contain any kind of spamvertised URL, so there is nothing to report to any web hosting admin, or via KnujOn, SIRT, Complainterator, for example.

Apart from reporting the spam itself to the sender's ISP (usually via SpamCop), where else could such reports be sent?

1. Deposit (419) Spams
These usually contain only mailto: links, sometimes a fax number.

2. Lonely Hearts Spams
Similar to No. 1, these usually contain only mailto: links. The From: and Reply-to: addresses are always fake. Sometimes they contain a .jpg attachment with a picture of a moderately attractive Russian or Eastern European minor female celebrity, who is very probably almost totally unknown to the outside world. I suspect that these pictures have probably been copied from websites or magazines, but they seem sometimes to have been "Photoshopped" to make them look as if they have been taken with a cheap digital camera or a mobile phone (cell phone) camera (i.e., taken by an amateur).

3. Fake Academic Qualifications
These usually contain only phone numbers, usually US-based.

4. Money Laundering (Masquerading as Fake Job Offers)
These usually contain only mailto: links or telephone or fax numbers. Very rarely, there is an actual URL pointing to the bogus international company which is offering the supposedly extremely lucrative position.

5. Malware Spams
These usually contain malware-infested attachments, along with a social engineering-type message designed to induce the unsuspecting recipient to open the attachment. It should be noted that these differ from spams containing actual links to malware distribution sites.

6. Pump-and-Dump Stock Spams
There is usually just a very brief plain text message. Occasionally the message is conveyed via an inline image, rather than plain text. (It should be noted that KnujOn does report these to the US SEC).

There doesn't seem to be any point reporting any of the above types of spam via KnujOn, SIRT, Complainterator or the like. Does anyone know where to report them?

I've been getting a lot of the above types of spam lately. In fact, in the last few months, they have reached a level of 15 - 20% of my total spam count, where previously they would have been less than 1%. (Nevertheless, having said that, it is still the case that the vast majority of the spam I receive is for fake pharmaceuticals, fake luxury items and online casinos).

Also, over the months of June, July and August 2008, I received almost 1000 spams containing malware links. On the other hand, so far this month, I have received fewer than 10 such messages, but the number of messages with malware attachments has increased from only 1 during July to 12 during August and then to 21 so far during September (with 8 days to go)!

Information, ideas or suggestions would be most welcome!

Phone numbers can be reported to the phone companies that own them. Try looking them up at http://www.telcodata.us/telcodata/telco . Some will shut the numbers down, some won't.

Email addresses can be reported to the free email services. Yahoo is very good at shutting them down, or at least they reply promptly to say they are doing so. Sometimes it takes some work to find out where to report others, but I am often pleasantly surprised at how fast I get action from countries I might have expected to be more laissez-faire. (Don't even think of abusing a -.za free email account from South Africa.)

I have Spamcop.net set up with an extra reporting address for the SEC; when I get stock spam I just check that box when I confirm the spam.

Spamcop now accepts spam with malware attachments, so I send them there. In the case of email worms, I have contacted the originating ISP directly, assuming the source is someone who has me in his/her address book and might appreciate getting tipped off about the problem. But I haven't had one of those in several years now.

I haven't tried reporting the lonely hearts spam, but spamislame will often pursue those until the sponsor agrees to cut off the spamming affiliate.

As always, Spamcop works best for reporting the origin of any kind of spam -- if the IP is in the headers, the person logged into that IP address at the time the spam was mailed is usually the innocent owner of a compromised machine, and the Spamcop report may be the first notice he/she receives that there is a problem. (The caveat is that people need to inform Spamcop of any of their own mail servers, so they aren't reporting themselves.)

Google accepts complaints about abused Gmail addresses at their web form http://mail.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=abuse_spoofing. I know that they only send out canned responses, but I also know that they usually act upon complaints in a timely manner.

Spamcop.net is very good at finding abuse addresses when you simply paste the offending email address into the reporting form. If you have a paid SC account, you can simply CC (user copy) the email abuse address.

for email addresses @jmail.co.za:
support@jobs.co.za

and don't forget to add
fraud.alert@met.police.uk
to any reports, just in case they are operating in the UK.

(Perhaps including that as cc is part of why my reports to report_spam@hotmail.com always get accepted first try?)

Thank you very much, everyone for all your replies!

What a wealth of information!

You've all given me heaps of new stuff to study and learn about!

It has all been VERY MUCH APPRECIATED!

One side note:

Those "Russian lonelyheart" spam messages: they make for some great ammo.

Want to fill out a mortgage lead? Use their email address.

Got a 419 scam message? Respond and tell them to use that address as the response address.

That should keep them busy for a while. I've been doing that for a year or more. I'd love to see some of the back and forth between "britishlotterymanager@hotmail.com" (british lottery 419 scam) and "lola119@lnhhome.com" (UALadys Russian dating scam).

SiL

Those "Russian lonelyheart" spam messages: they make for some great ammo.

Want to fill out a mortgage lead? Use their email address.

Got a 419 scam message? Respond and tell them to use that address as the response address.

That should keep them busy for a while. I've been doing that for a year or more. I'd love to see some of the back and forth between "britishlotterymanager@hotmail.com" (british lottery 419 scam) and "lola119@lnhhome.com" (UALadys Russian dating scam). Twisted Evil

Thank you for a good laugh as well as a Idea Spamislame..

Hey AC & SIL!

Glad to find all the good info in this thread. I've already put it to good use.

Hope you're having a good weekend...Bia

Hi, Bia!

@ Tamianth:

You've discovered two of the little idiosyncracies of Castlecops forum: If you swipe the text and hit "quote," instead of enclosing it in quotes, it puts both open and close quotes at the end of the post. (Same with italics/bold/color etc.) And you can't go back to edit after fifteen minutes.