Chapter 4. Obfuscation

The Achilles' heel of any Internet con artist is the web site they use to trick their victims. In order for the scam to function, victims have to be able to access a real site at a defined location on the Internet. But revealing that address opens the door for investigators, leading to their sites being shut down and perhaps to their true identities being discovered.

The bad guys are very aware of the problem and go to great lengths to disguise, or obfuscate, their real addresses in the vain hope that investigators will be fooled or become frustrated and give up the pursuit.

On top of that, spam-blocking software is making it increasingly difficult for their emails to get through to our mailboxes. Anything that can disguise an address and avoid it being added to a spam blacklist will extend the life of a scamso spammers will use every trick in the book.

It's a bit like an arms race, with pressure from our side forcing them to innovate and come up with new tricks. Fortunately for us, implicit in any form of obfuscation is the fact that browsers must be able to reveal the true URL in order to use it. If the browser can do it, so can we. This chapter covers a variety of tricks, some of them quite elegant, that scammers use to throw us off the scent of their trail.

The developers of Internet browsers are continually updating their software to address security exploits, including some of the tricks described here. As a result, with any given browser, some tricks will work and others will not. In due course, you can expect that many will be completely blocked. But these things have a way of reappearing in different contexts, so I will describe the complete menagerie.