An Overview of Japanese Make-Money-Fast Spam

Last week we blogged about Japanese adult dating spam. Another often-seen spam type in the Japanese language is the “make money fast” (MMF) offer. The following are some common MMF subject lines:

1.    Work at home business
2.    SOHO – Small Office Home Office
3.    Make Money Without Doing Anything

With this type of message, we have observed that spammers rely heavily on third-party mailers to distribute their email. The main reason why these spammers are using third-party mailers is to try and bypass anti-spam filtering. Spammers do so by utilizing shortened URL services to redirect end-users to their actual site. By using shortened URL sites, spammers can mask their actual URL domain in the message, thereby hoping to not be detected and/or blocked by anti-spam vendors. Below are a couple of examples:

Example 1:




Example 2:






By using legitimate third-party mailers as a medium, opt-out routes are almost always legitimate because they link to the third-party mailer’s system. This info is usually located at the bottom of a message. However, it doesn’t necessarily mean recipients have authorized the sender to distribute these promotions.  Spammers are trying to trick end users into thinking that they are a legitimate mailing company.

From a multi-level perspective, these messages promote sending spam mails as a part-time job. If a user is interested, he or she will be able to make up to hundreds of thousands of yen per month. The way it works is fairly simple. The lower stream participant (user A) has to purchase a mailing list to spam. One email address would cost, say, 0.0016 yen. User A will, in return, earn 0.0029 yen per one email sent. When recipients of the emails are lured into this loop, they will become user A’s lower stream and will need to purchase mailing lists from user A.

Multi-level money-making systems provide examples for recipients, explaining how the spammer has succeeded in making money using such online systems. They often target housewives or those who are in debt.

A typical money making website will look like this:

These websites usually use free online space or personal blogs to host such money-making information. The source of our case above, http://lolipop.jp, is one such Internet space/storage provider. It is easy to get away with avoiding spam accusations by mailing via a legit third-party mailer and hosting promotion material on such Web spaces.