When that April with his showers sweet...

In Chaucer’s day, the milder weather of April marked the start of the pilgrimage season. These days we have heat waves in March, and April is the time to render unto Caesar rather than God. As April 15th looms, American thoughts turn to taxes, not pilgrimages. Of course, where there is money involved, the spammers follows, and we are already seeing an upturn in tax related spam.

The main contributor to the spikes you see there is an email with the subject, Receive up to $500 in tax credits with New Windows. Look inside and it's nothing to do with Microsoft, they are talking about real, physical windows. The contents of the email vary, but here's an image from a typical one.

All mention of tax credits has vanished at this point. That was just a hook to get you to open the email. There is still a large SAVE $500 icon but that, it says in the fine print, comes from a 30% saving in annual energy bills. There's also unauthorized use of logos from Sears, Home Depot and a variety of window manufacturers. (Lowe's must be feeling left out.) Clicking on the image from Cloudmark HQ in San Francisco goes to a page that collects minimal information on windows requirement, but does mention San Francisco, so they are geocoding based on the IP address.

The next page in the sequence collects contact information, and submits it to an affiliate program. All this might just be written off as aggressive and somewhat deceptive marketing coupled with bad mailing list hygiene, until you click on the call to action link from a Canadian IP address. And then...

On the next page

You have to admire the Time Remaining counter to add that desperate sense of urgency, not to mention the annoying way the title bar kept flipping between You Are Today's Toronto Winner and Congratulations!  As a James Bond fan from way back, I was hoping the counter would stop on 00.7 like it does every time Bond stops a bomb going off, but no such luck. It just got down to zero and I still had a chance to click on the image to claim my prize.

Somebody should tell these guys the new iPad is out now. This is the start of a common scam that first has the user supply personal data which is used to generate affiliate revenue, then an advanced fee is requested to deliver the prize, and finally the credit card information supplied for the advanced fee is used to make further charges. Oh, yes, and the prize never turns up. Somehow I doubt if the new windows will, either.