Why you should never click “unsubscribe” on an illegal spam email

If you’re like me, every morning when you check your emails you find the same spam even though you’ve unsubscribed hundreds of times.

Cannabis candy? I unsubscribed yesterday.

Summary Research Refinance Company? Nope.

A natural cure for diabetes? I don’t even have diabetes.

It seems that no matter how careful you are about hitting the spam button or moving those emails to your spam folder, the same ones keep coming in day after day. Why is that?

Because these illegal crooks operate the opposite of legitimate traders.

When you ask to be taken off a list by a law-abiding company, the emails stop. Let’s say you signed up for a newsletter that you’re no longer interested in or bought something from an online retailer and you’re fed up with their daily sales letter. By pressing the unsubscribe button, you are usually immediately removed from the list.

This is because companies that operate illegally are afraid of breaking the CAN-SPAM laws put in place in 2003. These laws state that “a visible and operational unsubscribe mechanism is present in all emails” and that “Consumer opt-out requests are honored within 10 business days.”

via Unsplash

Now when you open an email from illegal scammers, you can actually receive more of their emails.

When these spam companies email you and you open it or tap unsubscribe, it confirms to them that your email address is viable. Most illegal spammers don’t specifically target you, they send millions of emails a day to random email addresses, some of which they’ve made from scratch.

So by opening the email and clicking Unsubscribe or flagging it as spam, you accidentally tell them, “I’m up.”

“It’s the bad instinct that causes what ends up happening,” said Marc Maiffret, a former hacker. NBC Chicago. “As soon as you hit unsubscribe, you’re basically saying that the email address x, y, z that received it … is active, there’s actually someone there.”

via Unsplash

The worst part is that by clicking on the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email, you risk exposing yourself to attacks.

“In reality, this is usually an indicator to increase the level of stuff they send to you. We even see when you click unsubscribe it will take you to a website and the website will actually try to attack your. computer, ”Maiffret explained. .

So the best thing to do if you see spam is not to open it. Instead, check the box next to the email and then tap the spam button. Spammers get reports of opened emails, so make sure you never do that.

But whatever you do, never unsubscribe on illegal spam.

“Don’t press unsubscribe if you don’t know who it’s from,” Chicago-Kent dean of law Harold Krent, a privacy expert, told NBC. “[The spammers] I don’t know there is an active being behind this email until you respond to it somehow. Once you’ve done that, it’s ripe for sale. “