Hacker News Reader

The terrible thing here is that:

'very common name' + 1 digit @yahoo.com generates a list almost completely of real email addresses...

Spammers don't care about cleaning their lists... So he just helped the spammer do his job, involving a few hundred unrelated victims.

View on HN

If all the scammer wanted was email addresses, they could have written a random yahoo email address generator on their own. They want legitimate email + password combos.

Given that world + dog has the entire Yahoo DB by now, I wonder if a list of yahoo username + password still has any value on the market... Well, I can only hope so, or else the scammer will just drop all the yahoo addresses from his take rather than try to clean up the data.

If you can somehow find the yahoo DB, I will pay you $5000 in bitcoin for it :)

This is likely not made to harvest email addresses for spam, but rather for email:password combos.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com