A fast and furious scam by spam as Gaeilge

NATIVE IRISH speakers are being targeted in a new wave of spam e-mails.

The message concerned purports to come from a Patrick Chan of the Hang Seng Bank in Hong Kong. It asks the recipient if they would be interested in a transaction involving “suim mhór airgid”.

Experts said the message, in poorly translated Irish, was most likely composed using software available for free on the internet. The supposed sender introduces themselves as “Tá mé” rather than “Is mise”.

According to the antivirus software distributor Eset Ireland, which discovered the scam, this is not the first case of Irish-language spam. But the latest wave of e-mails is arriving in much higher numbers than before.

Urban Schrott, IT security and cybercrime analyst with Eset Ireland, said many different addresses were used to send the messages. This makes it almost impossible to calculate how many e-mails were sent, how many were received and how many may have been blocked by spam filters before arriving in people’s inboxes.

Mr Schrott said the use of Irish was one of many social engineering tactics commonly used by spammers to increase the chances of computer users opening the message and possibly acting on its contents. He added that the business proposal mentioned in the e-mail is bogus, intended to extract money from victims. Anyone receiving such spam should ignore it, delete it and not try to contact the perpetrators.

In the past, similar e-mail scams have used the names of Irish banks to try and get people to click on the links or to visit particular websites.

“The point of this is for the sender to appear more credible, or even to get sympathy from someone who may be an Irish speaker and could be impressed that a person has bothered to translate the message,” said Mr Schrott.

The sender’s use of the name Patrick was probably deliberately chosen to resonate with an Irish audience, he added. According to the 2002 Census, 42 per cent of the population have the ability to speak in Irish, though only 3 per cent of households use it as their primary language.

Junk e-mail remains a significant problem on the internet. The IT security firm MessageLabs said 83.9 per cent of all e-mail traffic last month was classified as spam. Much of this is blocked by internet service providers so it doesn’t correspond to the amount that finds its way into people’s e-mail inboxes.