In the last few days I’ve found (by going into spam filtered mail) up to five Nigerian-style scam letters coming in a day. This is obviously to sucker the cash-strapped public into thinking they can walk away with millions of dollars for Christmas gift buying (just in time!). The problem here is that a bombardment of these letters probably makes them less effective unless people are extremely stupid not to notice these ridiculous offers over and over.
The letters are getting more creative. I, for example, have apparently won the Austrian Lottery and need to get the money out of escrow — fast! I also got one scam letter in Spanish and another in French! Both from African royalty. Also, apparently an until now unknown relative of mine died in a horrible car wreck in England and some crooked attorney wants me to help us split millions of dollars by my making a claim on the money. The list goes on.
related links:
Classic 2003 Dvorak Column on the Nigerian Scam Letter
State Department Memo (pdf)
But you get no spam
We need a little applied Darwinism. Who the hell is opening all of this junk, and how do we thin them from the internet heard? I don’t want to deny access of the web to people, but if open spam you should get a 2 week freeze on your email privileges, if you send personal information over an email exchange you did not initiate it would expand to a two month suspension. Caning would be introduced for repeat offenders.
Is that a real Ziggy strip?! I can’t imagine Ziggy being both topical AND funny.
An interesting sidebar to this story would be the scam baiters. At sites such as scamorama.com, people have fun stringing the scammers along and wasting their time. Some scam baiters actually collect small sums of money from the scammers as tokens of good faith while stringing them along. Wasting their time is the best way to deal with them, and it sounds like fun to boot. If enough people did that, they would dry up and go away.
I just got a “good one” from an eBay member…turns out, an older woman (78) was trying to bid on a wheelchair that she desperately needs…I clicked the “respond now” button that was so carefully provided and it took me to a site where I can put in my name and password…thing is, I’m not a stranger to this stuff and I got that far! I guess it is because I use eBay all the time and figured replying with an email was something considerate…of course, it didn’t take me to email…so I caught on. But, dang, the care in graphics and everything…very well done. Or, maybe I’m just an idiot today. Still…wow.
We are entirely too lienient with Internet criminals. 25 to life on the first offence, is not to severe. Count up the losses, including the cost to recover from spam, virus, tojans and malware du jour then multiply by the nunber of attempts and add in the value of lost confidence in the Internet. Then how may offenses from the same slime were likley not detected. Second offence – lobotomy
we need a .spm domian for spam servers
I don’t know what you guys are talking about. I’ve made billions helping doctors and villagers cover the fee to get their 81 million dollars back time and time again 😉
just checked out that site that James (#4) mentioned,http://www.scamorama and I have never laughed so hard.
I’ve been good for a while, knock on wood, but I used to receive those Nigerian scams all the time. I even called the RCMP (Canada’s Federal police) to report it. That let me know they were getting so many calls about it that it was too much for them to investigate. They just advised against replying. (No $%^$ !) I’ve always wanted too reply, and let them know I knew it was a scam and who were they kidding. But man those Scamorama guys. Thats the stuff. Sock it to em!
I just got one this AM from “a photojournalist embedded with a US unit in Iraq.” Apparently they had found Saddam’s gold or some such, I didn’t read past the first paragraph, and that only because it was unusual. So far. I’m sure there will be more. Dang clever if you think about it. People who might have a visceral distrust of Nigerians (or whoever) might be more prone to trust someone involved in the US effort in Iraq.
The 419 scam is just a variant of the Spanish Prisoner (see Wikipedia entry for this…!).
The ultimate deconstruction of the “Spanish Prisoner” scam was written by Arthur Train for the March, 1910 issue of THE COSMOPOLITAN MAGAZINE. I’ve put it up on the web at http://www.hidden-knowledge.com/funstuff/spanishprisoner/spanishprisoner1.html
Anyone that is dumb or greedy enough to get suckered by this gets exactly what they deserve.
And don’t tell me they prey on the elderly. Are you telling me that you suddenly get dumb enough to think that free money will fall into your lap after having worked for it for the first 70 years of your life?
Paul — I just caught the headline on some news site and haven’t a clue about the whys and wherefores — but, some medical body has determined, projected, that dementia [which should include Alzheimer’s] is expected to increase something like 20% each decades in coming decades.
I may have fluffed the numbers; but, I guess if we consider the class of ailments a by-product of aging beyond the evolved pattern that worked when we were terminating around 40 — there’s a bunch of prep to do.