Look at this spam I'm getting

[Lightmeow]

Read this!!!

 

The subject was Dear Friend(God Belss You) YES BLESS WAS SPELLED WRONG

 

My Dear

Ms. Diana Morokat is my name. I am the only daughter of late Pnkhmto Morokat,
who was slain by the rebel forces during this ongoing civil war in our country
Syria. I am 23 years old. I am an under-graduate, level 200 medical student at
University. I managed to escape into government refugee camp in London through
the help of some Red Cross Personnel's working in our country. I have an
estimate of TEN Million Dollars in cash that my father left in a Bank vault.
Now that he is no more, I want to transfer the ownership of the fund to you for
safe keeping and relocate to your country to complete my medical course and
permanently reside there. Please let me know if you can be honest with me and
assist me. I proposed to give you 30% of the fund at the successful end for
your honesty, confidentiality. All further details will be disclosed to you as
soon as I have your confidence. email: [i deleted it]
Respectfully

Diana Morokat

 

I got another one about the FBI wanting to give me 1 billion dollars that the government took away from me. I hate this, this is total crap that I'm getting this!!!

 

Wonder what site I signed up for to get them emailing me this, oh this makes me so angry

[EdEarl]

Don't panic, trash it. Almost everyone gets those.

[Strange]

This is the old 419 scam: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigerian_scam

[michel123456]

Yes, once a year on the average with a slightly different story.

[Phi for All]

I myself have gotten them. It harms the respectability of those of us who truly are Nigerian princes with large sums of money to bring to your country if only I could find a helpful citizen to help me escape oppression and share in my good fortune.

[imatfaal]

And I am afraid they work! The Nigerian 419 Scam was born from an old oil scam where the Minister of Oil / NNPC would contact spam people offering them oil at vastly knock-down rates - and twice ships that my company controlled were caught up with some poor fool thinking they had bought the oil on board only to find out that an oil major had a much better claim and weren't gonna relax their grip very quickly. In one of the frauds over 250,000 USD had changed hands! The 419 scams are much lower level but still sucker some people into revealing just enough of their bank/home details for their accounts to be compromised.

 

get a better spam filter and flag as spam rather than deleting so if you do have a learning filter then it has something to learn from

[ajb]

We all get span like that offering something we would like but is clearly too good to be true.

 

But what worries me more are the penis enlargement pills spam I get...how do they know?

[Lightmeow]

I just hate it because it insults my intelligence. And also, the email was a yahoo one, and I almost never trust yahoo.

[Strange]

I just hate it because it insults my intelligence.

 

Surprisingly, that is deliberate. As a con artist, you want to filter out those smart enough to see through you. These emails seem to have got worse (in terms of grammar, spelling plausibility) over time. This is, presumably, because they were wasting too much time with people who weren't dumb enough to fall for it.

 

There are some amusing web sites where people have taken on the scammers; pretending to be gullible. They often get them to pose with pictures holding up a piece of paper with a funny caption. In some cases, they have even managed to get the scammer to send them money!

[michel123456]

Have you never been called on the phone by "someone-from-a-society-in-Scotland" telling you that inspecting your IP he found that your computer has been attacked by a virus and that he (the one-from-a-society-in-Scotland) wants to connect directly to your computer in order to remove the virus?

[ajb]

Have you never been called on the phone by "someone-from-a-society-in-Scotland" telling you that inspecting your IP he found that your computer has been attacked by a virus and that he (the one-from-a-society-in-Scotland) wants to connect directly to your computer in order to remove the virus?

Yes, and it is totally fake. They will install a virus remover (that you never needed) and then try to charge you for the final virus removal. Or at least that is what I have read.

 

If they call just shout some profanities at them!

[michel123456]

Yes, they were quite unlucky because I gave the phone to my wife who knows to shout better than I do.

Edited January 6, 2014 by michel123456