Kathleen typing for Peter who is off on a business trip
This morning Peter got an e-mail that seemed to come from Susan Ellison telling a tale of woe about being mugged in London.
It’s a fake all the way. This e-mail had shown up on a doll group I am part of about 6 months ago and was outed as a scam from …wait for it….Nigeria. Yep, Nigeria.
So if you get an e-mail from Susan or anyone talking about being mugged in London and a tale of woe, it’s a scam all the way.
So pass the word. Susan is safely at home with her husband Harlan.
Thanks-
Kath
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I just emailed this blog entry’s link to Snopes.com, Kathleen. If they think it would make a good addition to their site, hopefully that’ll help get the word out to a broader audience. 🙂
Not only Susan. If you receive an e-mail with the same “I am overseas. Something bad happen to me. Send me money” line from any of your contact friends it is probably a spam or phishing e-mail. Malicious software in you PC or the server of your e-mail client or social network site “reads” your contact list and generates a phishing e-mail directed to you.
Always try to contact the person directly first before sending any money or personal info.
We actually received this email at work, supposedly from one of the museum’s docents. She and her husband actually were abroad in England at the time. Thankfully, one of the other docents knew how to get áhøld of her, and it turned out her email account had been hacked.
If she’s at home with Harlan, wouldn’t that necessarily maker her less safe? 🙂
No, she’d be perfectly safe – Harlan likes her. now, if anyone were to intend harm to Susan while she was with Harlan, I can’t say I’d care to be responsible for the attacker’s medical bills…
Sadly, this scam has popped up in worse places than e-mail. People have had their Facebook accounts hacked and this scam them perpetuated on their friends and family.
Yeah, this happened to me once. Someone got into my e-mail account and sent everyone on my e-mail list a letter saying I was stranded in England and needed someone to send me money to get home. The writing was very awkward, so most people realized it was a scam and what had happened – except for my aunt, who called my mother worried.
Amazing.
Meet the new generation of internet fraud… personalized automated and in your usual Russian or Nigerian flavors.
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Two days ago I received the best job offer I’ve gotten since I started fishing for job. Good in the “thats the kind of thing I want to do for a living” and pretty adjusted to my set of skills. I actually got pretty excited and had my response halfway written when I decided to check on the company and individual adressing the offer to me… the company name didnt match anything (the closer thing were a small contractor firm in New York) and the guy’s name directed me to a dutch forum on scams.
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It actually made me feel miserable for the rest of the day.
Yeah, but here’s the scary thing that kicked it to a new level: This wasn’t automated.
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Because when I got the email, instead of hitting reply, I wrote a separate email to Susan’s account telling her that I believed her email had been hacked. And I received, in reply, yet another email that said, “OMG! How can you not believe its me!” and went on about how desperate she was and here she had counted on me being able to help her out. Now putting aside that if she were doubled over from intestinal cramps, Susan still wouldn’t write OMG and would know to write “it’s,” but more to the point: It meant that the hacker was on live, in real time, logged onto the account and giving that additional customer service you don’t generally see in on-line scam artists.
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PAD
Something similar happened on Facebook last year.
It was a guy I went to high school with, and we hadn’t talked in years but one morning a chat box popped up from him asking for help. It was scary because it WAS live and he was responding in real time.
Something about it was off putting, though, so I Googled some key words, found it was a scam through an article. I went back to Facebook, sent him a link to the article and said, “I’d love to send you some money, but this is a scam and you’ve hacked the account.”
It’s the first mail that’s usually automated. They send as many as they can and then personally manage whatever response they get. I guess they have some kind of alert whenever a fish tugs the line.
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I remember a long time ago a brilliant mail chain between a nigerian scammer and some guy who turned it into a lovecraftian descent into mythos and madness. Cant seem to find the whole thing tho, since Geocities got erased, but I am sure you could have managed a very amusing charade out of this (if you had the time or inclination, that is).
El Hombre,
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Was it on 419eater.com? A lot of those are really interesting. I keep meaning to get the book that the site owner wrote.
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Theno
Hmmm. After reading about a similar scam last year, that very same night I got an email from a friend asking for money overseas. I did not believe the email at first, but it did turn out to be true. I suggest that with close friends, you agree on a “safe” word to use in case of emergencies.
Now we live in a world of facebook, text and email communications, it’s sometimes easy to forget the obvious. Simply reply to the email with a request for them to call you – reversing the charges if necessary. A friend will have your number (and you’ll recognise their voice) a scammer won’t:)