Rick's World

I got an interesting spam email today. It purports to be from the 'United Stated National Medical Association'. As soon as I saw this name, I was highly skeptical. I had never heard of this 'government agency' before, so I did a quick Whois search on the domain. I discovered that not only was this so called government agency domain only registered on June 29, 2007 (a couple days ago), but it was done through a domain info masking service. In other words, it's a brand new domain and the owner is trying to hide his identity.

Had this been a genuine government agency, it would likely have been registered long before June 29th of this year, and they wouldn't be hiding their whois identity. Also, it likely would have been using a *.gov domain rather than a *.com domain. This appears to be an attempt by an online seller of prescription drugs to knock out the competition by making unsuspecting email recipients think they are a valid government agency. Then they just list all their competitors as unauthorized sellers of drugs and they get all the business selling drugs as the only 'legit' company.

I have to say, it's always interesting to see how the spammers are constantly changing their tactics to try to keep people buying their crap. You can read the entire email below. Note that I intentionally broke up the URL links so that they won't work from my blog and this site won't get any traffic from me...

The original spam email

The United States National Medical Association

Do you buy pharmaceuticals online? The US NMA was specifically established to
protect the consumer. Our experts check every online shop for bogus medicines. The
blacklist of unreliable or simply fraud shops is updated every week. We strongly
recommend to visit our site before buying any medical products online. visit us

Our site http: // www .us-nma .com

The common ways of online cheating are:
- delivery of low quality or fraud products.
- an enormous delay (up to 2-3 months) in delivery of products.
- shops obtain all the credit cards numbers and other credit information and then
simply send nothing.
- shops sell unlicensed products they know nothing or very little about.
- shops themselves don't have a license to sell the pharmaceuticals.

Please check our blacklist of unreliable and fraud shops before buying any medical
products online!!! Protect your family and yourself.

http: // www .us-nma .com/

With all due respect and care.
The US NMA.

Update: It looks like they are back. See my comments here...