• Sublime Core Feed
Medium Severity

BEC/Fraud: Romance Scam

Labels

BEC/Fraud
Free email provider
Social engineering
Content analysis
Header analysis

Description

This rule detects messages attempting to initiate a Romance scam. The rule leverage tells such as undisclosed recipients, freemail emails in the body and common scam phrasing. Romance scams are deceptive schemes where scammers establish false romantic intentions towards individuals to gain their trust and eventually exploit them financially.

References

No references.

Sublime Security
Created Nov 22nd, 2023 • Last updated Nov 23rd, 2023
Feed Source
Sublime Core Feed
Source
GitHub
type.inbound

// no links
and (
  length(body.links) == 0

  // or 1 link, but link doesn't match the sender's domain
  or (
    length(body.links) == 1
    and sender.email.domain.root_domain not in $free_email_providers
    and all(body.links,
            .href_url.domain.root_domain != sender.email.domain.root_domain
    )
  )
)

// no attachments
and length(attachments) == 0

// honorific 
and regex.icontains(sender.display_name,
                    '(?:Mr|Mrs|Ms|Miss|Dr|Prof|Sir|Lady|Rev)\.?[ \t]+'
)

// And an email is found in the body, and a freemail domain is found also
and (
  regex.contains(body.current_thread.text,
                 "[A-Za-z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Za-z0-9.-]+\\.[A-Za-z]{2,}"
  )
  and any($free_email_providers, strings.icontains(body.current_thread.text, .))
)

// common scammy phrases
and regex.icontains(body.current_thread.text,
                    "(I am|My name is) .* (from|staying in) .+\\.",
                    ".*(years old|cm|kg).*\\.",
                    ".*(photo|pictures|sexy).*\\.",
                    ".*(email|contact me|write to me|reply to me) at .*@.*\\."
)
and (
  (
    profile.by_sender().prevalence in ("new", "outlier")
    and not profile.by_sender().solicited
  )
  or (
    profile.by_sender().any_messages_malicious_or_spam
    and not profile.by_sender().any_false_positives
  )
)
and not profile.by_sender().any_false_positives
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