Weird contacts from web site - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: AndyC_772
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 20, 2021, 11:59:22 am
content: Hi all,My business has a web site with a contact form, which potential customers can use to submit enquiries. Naturally it also attracts some spam.Most of the spam that come in, I understand. Generally it's ads for junk SEO services and web site design, spamming services, and the odd dodgy medical product. Occasionally it's links to files which I presume are malware trying to spread.Occasionally, though I get a contact which is just two words in the form of a name, like:The Smith'sorThe Jones's(I've not used the actual names in case they're in some way unique to me, and the knowledge that I've seen them is in some way beneficial to the spammer. There's clearly a short dictionary in use as I've seen several names more than once).Any idea what the scam is here? There's no link, nothing clickable, no contact details or other information - just "The <name>'s", and confirmation that the 'yes to privacy policy' box was ticked.My best guess is it's a bot searching for contact forms and testing which ones work - but the names thing is just plain weird. Any ideas? If you have a web site, do you get these too?It reminds me of when I used to have a generic redirect set up so that emails to <anything>@mydomain would end up in my inbox. I used to get spam sent to some very strange addresses, lots of not-quite-real names or words @mydomain which would never actually exist as real contact addresses, and I could never work out why these addresses would be used instead of plausible guesses like sales@ or support@.

author: ataradov
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 20, 2021, 06:24:31 pm
content: They want you to reply back, assuming it was a message that got cut of. It is much easier to continue the scam if you initiate the communication.

author: AndyC_772
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 20, 2021, 06:48:17 pm
content: There's no contact information provided - all I get is literally "the <name>'s". I couldn't reply even if I wanted to.

author: Alex Eisenhut
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 21, 2021, 03:59:59 am
content: I'd bet on the side of your "bot searching" hypothesis.

author: AndrewNorman
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: May 21, 2021, 11:47:07 am
content: I have heard of this sort of thing being done as a liveness test for a website.Basically, if they can submit something to the website and it doesn't throw any exceptions then they can have better confidence that the website is live and working.

author: AntiProtonBoy
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 21, 2021, 04:48:38 pm
content: Quote from: AndyC_772 on May 20, 2021, 11:59:22 amDoes it matter? Unless you're into OPSEC the best course of action is to nuke such emails and worry about things that's worth worrying.

author: golden_labels
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 23, 2021, 08:55:30 pm
content: Bots have no understanding of what fields in the contact form mean. They fill it in blindly and send. I suspect they “misinterpret” the fields and you’re getting content intended for a different field in the message body.