Bremsstrahlung

Just received this:

It's so totally believable that:

• I would have anything like 20 GB of data on any of my accounts
• The administrator for any of the systems I have an account on would send email from an address at quinnipiac.edu
• Being over quota could be fixed not by deleting excess emails, but by. . .
• Visiting a URL at a website that looks like a URL shortener (but isn't), does not correspond to any of the institutions with which I have an email account, and does not even correspond to the supposed source of this email. (In order to 're-validate the mailbox')

So let's see the 'mailbox re-validation' process:

Man, after seeing that, there's no question of this message's authenticity. (I mean, they used PHP Form Generator!) As promised above, the apparent URL shortener address has turned out to actual be the final destination. And all I have to do to magically fix the non-existant problem is to enter just about every piece of information in sight. Including, if these guys are complaining that my mailbox is full, why do they have to ask me for my address? But no matter, none of the form fields is actually required anyway. (Although failure to enter an email address results in an error message.)

I decided to be helpful, and entered all of the information for spamman, whose address is of course spam@spammyspam.com. (His password is 'baconeggsandspam'.) The huge text on the resulting page informed me that "[My] Request Was Processed Successfully...." and gave me a link to "continue ........". . . to google.com. Just what I needed to complete the process.

Update: This just keeps getting better. I poked into the source for the form, and tracked it back to the website where it's actually hosted. Our clueless scammer has over a dozen of these forms, and for each I've checked the 'administration' page is publicly accessible. I took the liberty of erasing all of the entries on one form that looked like they might have been from real people who were tricked. I have to do some homework and go to class, but a little later today, I think our friend the scammer is going to be introduced to automatically generated content. In large quantities.