However, generally there are two types of fraudulent emails known as Spam Emails and Scam Emails, both of which are sent out randomly and in bulk to thousands of recipients in one go and will eventually lead to some form of criminal attempt to defraud the email recipient. And then there is also something a bit less common known as a Phishing email, which also shares some crossover characteristics from both spam and scam emails.
On this website though we post mainly scam emails, some phishing emails, and generally no spam emails at all. Following below we summarize the major differences between a spam and a scam email, as well as phishing emails, so that you can more easily distinguish the differences between all of them.
SPAM
Spam emails are e-mails that often have semi-professional looking graphics, may also contain some advertising photos of people or a product and/or use of a nice looking typeface. They typically contain illusive offers and phony advertisements that are intended to get the recipient to click on a link which the email indicates will take you to a website to obtain their offer. Misleading and phony offers contained in spam emails are often for such things as weight loss offers, solutions for common medical problems, free or low cost gadgets, offers from dating and romance web sites, male physical enhancement offers, links to po*n*gr*p*y websites, notices from so-called giveaway, reward, or bonus offers, links to fake credit card applications, fake online surveys, online gambling websites, fake bank offers, fake loan offers, credit score boosting, etc.
But the links provided in spam emails are typically fake and are usually designed to infect your computer with some form of malicious software, a virus, or the link unexpectedly takes you to a website that asks you to enter in some of your personal information. This providing of information on a spammer’s website may then also lead to identity theft, some fraudulent charges appearing on your credit card, and/or some internet criminals stealing some money directly from your bank account in the future. Sometimes the links contained in spam emails may also redirect you to many different unexpected and unrelated websites at the same time with even more illusive offers and/or pop-up windows appearing with flashy messages within your internet browser, all of which are designed and intended to be malicious in one way or another.
SCAMS
Scam emails are much different than spam emails though. Scam emails usually don’t contain any elaborate graphics or any fake advertising links to click on and are often simply emails with lots of text and lengthy email messages. Alternatively, scam emails are emails sent out by imposters who are using a fake personal identity and are attempting to perpetrate a financial crime that is known as “Advance Fee-Fraud”.
Advance-Fee Fraud is best described as an offer of a large amount of free money, merchandise, services, employment, or even romance, but where the victim is asked to pay a fee in advance to obtain whatever is being promised to them by the scammer. The main scam strategy of all advance-fee fraud scams is to try to persuade the victim to send money to the scammer, and then continue to send more money to the scammer, as many times as possible in fact, until the victim eventually runs out of money and/or goes into debt as a result of financial losses from the scam.
In advance-fee fraud scam emails one is often asked to initially reply to the scam email by confirming interest in the scammer’s offer and to provide the scammer with a lot of one's personal information and a copy of one’s personal identity. Scam emails often start out with overly friendly or complimentary greeting messages and may also contain lots of bad grammar, long sentences that don’t make much sense, and/or with various punctuation mistakes, and a generally bad use of overly wordy vocabulary.
Some scam emails also seem as if they have been sent to the recipient accidentally, but contain an offer involving a lot of money. This is a technique used by scammers in hopes hat the email recipient will disregard the fact that the email does not appear intentional and that the recipient will respond to the fake financial offer anyway. These emails might indicate something about an overdue payment or some other form of unexpected financial compensation.
Other examples of typical scam emails are where the imposter making contact in the email claims to be seeking a business or investment partner or says that they are from a government agency (the United Nations, the IMF, etc) a law enforcement agency (the FBI, Interpol, etc), a retail bank (Chase, HSBC, Bank of America, etc) or a government central bank (Federal Reserve Bank, Central Bank of Nigeria, etc), a military officer, a barrister or lawyer, a diplomatic agent, from a lottery, from a courier or delivery company (FedEx, DHL, etc), regarding a donation, regarding an ATM card with preloaded money, regarding some kind of electronic money transfer (Western Union, Money Gram, etc), financial aid, a widow with a lot of money, a refugee with a lot of money, an orphan or a dying person with a lot of money, an inheritance or next of kin proposal, a loan offer, or some other offer involving someone whom you don’t know, but is wanting to send you a lot of money.
PHISHING
Phishing emails are a bit different in the sense that they often resemble spam, but are more malicious and can lead to blatant attempts to simply obtain some of your personal information right away or may lead to some other form of a financial scam. Phishing emails usually spoof as having been sent from a large and well known financial institution or some other type of large online service provider, but they are fake and will immediately ask you to respond to the email message by providing some of your login credentials for one of your online accounts. Click here for a more detailed explanation about phishing email attacks.
SAMPLES
Scams: You can read through any of the tens of thousands of scam emails posted on this website to gather a better understanding of what scam emails often appear like. You can also click here to see a thread containing a few hundred scam emails from imposters that are all pretending to make contact from the same person at the FBI.
Phishing: Click here to see a typical phishing type email spoofing to have been sent from Facebook.
Spam: Examples of what some of the many types of typical spam emails look like are shown in the screenshots below:
