Spam / Snooping in Vietnam

September 27, 2006 11:57 PM

I move to Vietnam. Nobody here has my gmail address and suddenly I get Vietnamese spam. How come?

I moved to sweaty HCMC and have never given out my gmail address locally. Now I am getting vietnamese spam into my gmail a/c. I have only ever used the gmail a/c it to email a picture to my mum back in the uk. I connect to the internet through the hotel broadband with an access card that that has a login and a scratch off password. How come the spammers have my email address? Who is snooping and how?

posted by priorpark17 to computers & internet (9 comments total)

Perhaps you viewed a message that was either an image spam or had a loading clear tracking gif? The spammer would then have a record of you opening spams, and could do a ip lookup in a geo-ip database. Seeing that you were in Vietnam, they'd sell the address to someone specializing in Vietnamese targeted spam.

That's my educated guess.
posted by mmdei at 12:55 AM on September 28, 2006

Someone installed a packet sniffer at the hotel or its ISP.
posted by frogan at 1:16 AM on September 28, 2006

Your mum is a spammer in her spare time?

It's possible your mum has a spam trojan/virus looking at the IPs of incoming mails and sending them back to a home base along with their email addresses.
posted by zaebiz at 1:36 AM on September 28, 2006

I'm gonna go with the first poster and also guess that someone managed to to track a image load, an iframe tag, or some sort of hit-countable item from a different email and recognized the Vietnam IP.
posted by vanoakenfold at 3:21 AM on September 28, 2006

Other possibilities

-Your own pc has a locally contracted trojan or virus?
-The google hosted in Viet Nam harvests and sells email addresses?
posted by poppo at 6:57 AM on September 28, 2006

-or the local ISP may do this as well?
posted by poppo at 6:59 AM on September 28, 2006

Whatever you've got, I think it's common. I've relocated to Japan, and I and everyone I know out here has experienced the same thing -- before exchanging a single email with a Japanese recipient. There's something about actually being located here -- despite the fact that I use a central online email system (Yahoo Canada).
posted by dreamsign at 7:20 AM on September 28, 2006

I don't believe for a second that a hotel network would be even vaguely secure. If I were using the Internet through a hotel network, I'd just assume that spammers were paying the hotel for access to every byte I received and transmitted, and I'd do all my browsing via a ssh tunnel.

If all you care about keeping private is your mail, though, just connecting to it via https://mail.google.com/ should be good enough.

Of course if you're not using your own computer, all security bets are off.
posted by flabdablet at 7:43 AM on September 28, 2006

Perhaps Gmail's spam filter is location-sensitive? Vietnamese text is going to look a lot less "spammy" to the filters if it's going to someone who last logged in from a Vietnamese IP address.

But my money is that you were sniffed on the hotel network.
posted by toxic at 5:50 AM on April 3, 2007