Why You Shouldn't "Unsubscribe" From Spam

Why You Shouldn’t “Unsubscribe” From Spam

Spam accounts for an estimated 80 percent of all email traffic in the United States

By Lisa Parker

| Tuesday, Jul 10, 2012 |

NBC Chicago’s Lisa Parker offers this first-person cautionary tale about why you shouldn’t use the “unsubscribe” link often included in Spam email.

“Don’t unsubscribe…Never ever, ” said Steve Filipiak.

He should know. He did it and now regrets it.

“I was so frustrated that for the first name I put [expletive] and the second name I put “You,” he recalled.

So was he unsubscribed? Quite the opposite.

“And the next day I got email, Dear [Expletive] You.”

“Oh thousands! Yeah, they were just coming in. You could watch them pop in one after the other,” he said.

For this report, we interviewed an expert who knows all about the guys on the other side of the spam emails. Marc Maiffret is a former hacker who was once profiled on reality TV for his years as a teenage hacker. These days he works for the other side as a security consultant, and tells his clients never to click unsubscribe if they do not know the sender.

Worse, said Maiffret:

“In reality, that’s usually an indicator to increase the level of things they send to you. We even see when you click unsubscribe, it’ll take you to a website and the website will actually try and attack against your computer,” he explained.

For example, in some cases much of the advertisement itself is in one large image. That makes it harder for a spam filter to process. We also saw examples of long passages of text hidden under a white screen, legitimate words you might see in an email that designed to pass a spam filter.

All of this is a predatory twist to the “unsubscribe” feature that was supposed to help consumers. The federal CAN SPAM Act mandates marketers offer a way out of unwanted emails. A law legitimate companies take seriously, but not the fly-by-nighters.

“Don’t hit unsubscribe if you don’t know who it’s from,” advised Chicago-Kent Law Dean Harold Krent, a privacy expert. “[The spammers] don’t know there’s an active being behind that email until you respond in some fashion. Once you do, it’s ripe for the selling.”

By trying to get off the lists, we unsubscribers just get in deeper.

“I learned my lesson,” said Filipiak. “Clicking unsubscribe just ratcheted up another notch.”