Week of 8/11/03:
So email has certainly presented us with it share of scams. You might remember the Nigerian loan scam, where you get an email requesting a 'urgent business relationship' from some foreign dignitary with a foreign name and title to match like "Prince Samid SeSe GoonyGooGoo" or something. The deposed prince needs your help to extort money from his fallen empire and all you have to do to cash in is give him access to your personal info and bank routing #. After all, how is the Prince supposed to pay you all that money if he doesn't have permission to put money into your account (did I mention routing #'s are used to withdraw money also)?
Then there was the Paypal scam where a clever scammer sent emails that appear to be from Paypal where a user completed a form passing all their financial info to a third party, along with their paypal credentials. Now these types of scams may only be good for a laugh as far as you are concerned, but (no shit) billions were taken through scams like these.
This kind of thing is just enforcement of Daperlman's Law which states: "It is the duty of every capitalist society to quickly and consistently separate fools from their money." Spam isn't the only way fools and their money part, in fact telemarketing is still probably the quickest way to steal from old people. I once watched an episode of Investigative Reports on A&E about just that. Basically the most successful scam consisted of a paid entries into a contest where the unsuspecting blue hairs were guaranteed one of 4 or 5 prizes. The catch, the entry costs $200 a pop and the prizes were absolutely worthless. Example: The luxurious fur coat that they were giving away was taken to a furrier and found to be made of rat assholes. I am not making that up they even found urine and feces stains on the coat they took to a furrier to be analyzed.
Well, this spam never actually made it to any of my inboxes, it was actually sent to a co-worker. But its premise is so laughable, so ridiculous, that I just had to share it. Rather than precede it with an explanation I have pasted its text in below (address removed and form disabled):
-----HEADER-----
From: Fethard-biz Manager [mailto:Brier_Jessie@yahoo.com]
Sent: Thursday, August 14, 2003 4:23 AM
To: EMAIL_REMOVED
Subject: You credit card has been charged for $234.65
-----BODY-----
Important notice
We have just charged your credit card for money laundry service in amount of $234.65 (because you are either child pornography webmaster or deal with dirty
money, which require us to layndry them and then send to your checking account).
If you feel this transaction was made by our mistake, please press "No".
If you confirm this transaction, please press "Yes" and fill in the form below.
So does anyone have any guesses what this does? Well whether you press 'yes' or 'no' the page is processed on a page that is part of this 'fethard.biz' domain. I imagine they run through charges on your card. Now how can I possibly begin to tell you how silly this email is. Here is an email from a stranger that states that you are a child porn webmaster... or something else where you deal with dirty money. So now I am supposed to go through the following thought process:
"Okay honest mistake, I better straighten this out by giving them my credit card info and expiration date." What is even more ridiculous is how completely amateur this looks and sounds. Aside from the obvious misspellings, the form looks like a web page created in a kindergarten class. The ICQ address does make me wonder if some poor shlemazel is getting a million nasty ICQ IM's (although the people dumb enough to think a person would put their own real ICQ ID are the same schmucks who would complete and submit the form).
