[Humour] A slightly different scam email

[Dick Swiveller]

I did get a similar one a few weeks ago - strangely on my work email address which I don't use to sign up for anything other than work sites so no idea who they are buying their email address list from - not a Facebook or email jobby. If yours was like mine then it was from some poor sod's hacked email account so not much point stringing them along. They actually said as much rather than the "I'm abroad" line.

 

[Triggaaar]

If yours was like mine then it was from some poor sod's hacked email account so not much point stringing them along.

No point either way, they'll send this out to many thousands of people, whilst knowing most will ignore it or just try and waste their time. They'll just ignore and leave the gullible to send them some cash (well, bitcoin).

 

[Megazone]

These emails aren't all scams. I've invested loads of cash into a business deal in Nigeria where I'll receive 50x the money I invested. All I've got to do is wait until Mr Angero contacts me back. Well worth selling the house for. Any good Holiday recommendations?

 

[Rowdey]

I've had a couple of variations of this too.

Apparently, the bitcoin address/s can be traced back to one Ukranian who has done alright out of it, but no millionaire yet.

 

[shingle]

I've had a couple of variations of this too.

Apparently, the bitcoin address/s can be traced back to one Ukranian who has done alright out of it, but no millionaire yet.

Christ, I've just come back from The Ukraine

 

[Rowdey]

Christ, I've just come back from The Ukraine

I'm sure thats just co-incidental..

 

[LlcoolJ]

It's an interesting angle but surely a few years out of date. Who would really be embarrassed by the idea that someone knew they watched porn nowadays?

"Ooh look, this bloke's been watching porn on the internet" Yeah, just like hundreds of millions of other people, every day.

 

[Albion my Albion]

None, strange I know, but I don't visit porn sites.

You don't know what you're missing. Obviously!

 

[BNthree]

Not sure what you mean? And have no idea about how Bitcoin works.

This is one I saved from order@nolaneighbors.com name Aileen Hutsell

Hello.


If you were more attentive while caress yourself, I wouldn't worry you. I don't think that playing with yourself is really awful, but when all colleagues, relatives and friends receive video of it- it is terrible for u.

I seized virus on a porn site which you have visited. When the target tap on a play button, device begins recording the screen and all cameras on your device begins working.

Moreover, my virus makes a remote desktop supplied with key logger function from the device , so I was able to get all contacts from your e-mail, messengers and other social networks. I'm writing on this e-mail because It's your working address, so you must check it.

In my opinion 300 usd is pretty enough for this little misstep. I made a split screen vid(records from screen (u have interesting tastes ) and camera ohh... its awful AF)

So its ur choice, if u want me to delete ur disgrace use my bitсоin wallet аddress- 14s8197QteTeXfbH9Tmsu43BE9xXjmmg8Z
You have one day after opening my message, I put the special tracking pixel in it, so when you will open it I will see.If ya want me to show u the proofs, reply on this letter and I will send my creation to five contacts that I've got from ur device.

P.S. U can try to complain to police, but I don't think that they can help, the inquisition will last for one year- I'm from Ukraine - so I dgf lmao

Looks like 4 people paid up in response to this one!

https://blockexplorer.com/address/14s8197QteTeXfbH9Tmsu43BE9xXjmmg8Z

 

[symyjym]

Looks like 4 people paid up in response to this one!

https://blockexplorer.com/address/14s8197QteTeXfbH9Tmsu43BE9xXjmmg8Z

Wow Hahahaha

 

[SouthCoastOwl]

Jamie him

 

[shingle]

I'm sure thats just co-incidental..

Holiday in Odessa with the missus

 

[Dick Swiveller]

You get a poor class of scammer these days. Just checked my spam and found this. I am not Paul Evans, BTW. I am intrigued by Outstanding rewards though. I am genuinely interested who these come from. My guess is a kid who has got hold of a list on the dark web or something but if people are clever enough to figure out how to get a list of people to email and hide the from details, why can't they at least make half a decent effort with the email itself?

To
paul evans
Message body
Amazon.com

Dear xxx
all our congratulations

We are pleased to announce that your email address xxx, was drawn and you have won
Outstanding Rewards


Thank you for confirming now on this link
Remember that you are one of the few winners. And you can confirm yourself until.

Friday 15.06.2018, 23 hours 59 minutes. .

Best regards,
Sophie Director of the draw

 

[father_and_son]

You get a poor class of scammer these days. Just checked my spam and found this. I am not Paul Evans, BTW. I am intrigued by Outstanding rewards though. I am genuinely interested who these come from. My guess is a kid who has got hold of a list on the dark web or something but if people are clever enough to figure out how to get a list of people to email and hide the from details, why can't they at least make half a decent effort with the email itself?

To
paul evans
Message body
Amazon.com

Dear xxx
all our congratulations

We are pleased to announce that your email address xxx, was drawn and you have won
Outstanding Rewards


Thank you for confirming now on this link
Remember that you are one of the few winners. And you can confirm yourself until.

Friday 15.06.2018, 23 hours 59 minutes. .

Best regards,
Sophie Director of the draw

You don't need a list of email addresses to run a scam like this. You just need a random name generator and plug in multiple variations of the name (firstname + surname, surname+first name, with an underscore, with a dot, with years on the end, etc etc).

The power of email scams over, say, old fashioned postal ones is that it doesn't cost anymore to send 1million emails as it does to send 1, so any moron can write the code to automatically run these out, spoofing the sending IP address and name (or in many cases run them off on a bot-net so you don't even have to spoof the IP).

Anyone with the smallest of programming experience can easily script this.

 

[Dick Swiveller]

You don't need a list of email addresses to run a scam like this. You just need a random name generator and plug in multiple variations of the name (firstname + surname, surname+first name, with an underscore, with a dot, with years on the end, etc etc).

The power of email scams over, say, old fashioned postal ones is that it doesn't cost anymore to send 1million emails as it does to send 1, so any moron can write the code to automatically run these out, spoofing the sending IP address and name (or in many cases run them off on a bot-net so you don't even have to spoof the IP).

Anyone with the smallest of programming experience can easily script this.

I don't have the most common surname to say the least so I doubt it was a random generator. I know there are no cost implications but you would think there would be the smallest bit of QA done on these emails to try and maximise bites.

 

[father_and_son]

I don't have the most common surname to say the least so I doubt it was a random generator. I know there are no cost implications but you would think there would be the smallest bit of QA done on these emails to try and maximise bites.

Most are being translated into English by Google (and we all see how good that is when we are linked to a player from overseas) or even passing through google translate a couple of times to make the language appear to be foreign!


I also saw an article that says a couple of spelling mistakes/bad grammar actually increases the believability and so some are deliberately added to the most realistic scam emails.

Any digital phonebook/electoral roll/customer list will give enough surnames, common or otherwise.

I imagine most of these are coming from some spotty 17yo incel who had the idea and shared it with his equally spotty mates and it blew up from there.

Microsoft offered a solution to this a decade or more ago and it was never taken up by the industry...

Instead of making sending an email "free", you require the sender to perform a number of complex calculations (I believe at the time they suggested filtering through fragments of SETI data). The processing time taken would be a couple of seconds on a standard machine and if you send a few emails a day you wouldn't even be aware it was happening. However, the processing overhead of obtaining a "single-use licence to send an email" would have crippled the ability of the spammers and scammers to send millions a day as they would both have to perform some calculations for EVERY recipient of the email and also, would be logged as requesting a snippet of data from the central depository to perform the calculations on and large-scale requests for data would be monitored and actioned on.

This was the *only* time I have actually agreed with the idea of artificially hampering a free and open internet. It was a great idea but at the time spam email was an annoyance rather than a way to scam people.

 

[Dick Swiveller]

Most are being translated into English by Google (and we all see how good that is when we are linked to a player from overseas) or even passing through google translate a couple of times to make the language appear to be foreign!


I also saw an article that says a couple of spelling mistakes/bad grammar actually increases the believability and so some are deliberately added to the most realistic scam emails.

Any digital phonebook/electoral roll/customer list will give enough surnames, common or otherwise.

I imagine most of these are coming from some spotty 17yo incel who had the idea and shared it with his equally spotty mates and it blew up from there.

Microsoft offered a solution to this a decade or more ago and it was never taken up by the industry...

Instead of making sending an email "free", you require the sender to perform a number of complex calculations (I believe at the time they suggested filtering through fragments of SETI data). The processing time taken would be a couple of seconds on a standard machine and if you send a few emails a day you wouldn't even be aware it was happening. However, the processing overhead of obtaining a "single-use licence to send an email" would have crippled the ability of the spammers and scammers to send millions a day as they would both have to perform some calculations for EVERY recipient of the email and also, would be logged as requesting a snippet of data from the central depository to perform the calculations on and large-scale requests for data would be monitored and actioned on.

This was the *only* time I have actually agreed with the idea of artificially hampering a free and open internet. It was a great idea but at the time spam email was an annoyance rather than a way to scam people.

I hadn't heard of that suggestion and it would certainly make sense.