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Quantification of Multimillion Offers in ‘Next-of-Kin’ Unsolicited Bulk Emails

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ICT Analysis and Applications

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems ((LNNS,volume 154))

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Abstract

Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE) still continues to successfully pass through the keyword-based and Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based filters due to the smart use of ‘word-salad’, ‘slang’ and ‘leet’ by the spammers to dilute as well as pollute the email text. Many research works account for the wastage of bandwidth and time of users as well as loss of money due to victimization to ‘next-of-kin’ type of UBE. This is the first formal attempt to present the quantified results on the calculations of averages for transaction amount offered, offered share of total amount, duration of transaction completion and total amount mentioned in such UBE. A peep is also provided on the identification of most frequently used first-names and surnames by the spammers. It is emphasized that this type of UBE does not ask for bank details and asks for money directly, unlike the many other types of UBE often confused with this type. On the side lines, the paper presents an interplay of scam and spam while providing useful statistical information for design of more robust spam email filters and blockers. A corpus of more than 1500 specific and only ‘next-of-kin’ type of spam emails has been used. It has been found that the average, respectively, for amount and share offered by the spammers is 10.64 million USD and 39.43% of the total amount. Only 5.57, 2.49 and 1.86% of the total number of spam emails mention the offered share, duration of transaction completion and total amount, respectively. The average transaction duration was 9 days while the average of total amount was found to be 134 million USD. ‘Aisha’ and ‘Kabore’ were the most frequent first-name and surname respectively.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research, Symbiosis International Deemed University, Pune, India

    Jatinderkumar R. Saini & Sachin Naik

Authors
  1. Jatinderkumar R. Saini
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  2. Sachin Naik
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Correspondence to Jatinderkumar R. Saini .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Macau, Zhuhai, Macao

    Simon Fong

  2. Techno India College of Engineering, Kolkata, India

    Nilanjan Dey

  3. Global Knowledge Research Foundation, Ahmedabad, India

    Amit Joshi

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Saini, J.R., Naik, S. (2021). Quantification of Multimillion Offers in ‘Next-of-Kin’ Unsolicited Bulk Emails. In: Fong, S., Dey, N., Joshi, A. (eds) ICT Analysis and Applications. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 154. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-8354-4_45

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-8354-4_45

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-15-8353-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-15-8354-4

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