The worse email ever

I just found this in my inbox

Hello!

My name is Kate, I'm married and my husband is working
on a oil platform. He comes home only one weekend per month.

I am very lonely here by myself. I'm seeking a male partner
to help me pass the time. Please contact me for a discreet,
no-strings experience.

Here is my private site (check out my livecam):

http://liv****.1fr**h*me.com **edited out by me for legal reasons**

You have to install the small webcam plugin to see
my livecams.

Yours,
Kate


So basicaly the sad people that fall for it will download some virus then moan that there computer is messed up. This email was so bad it made me laugh. Do people actually fall for this scams?

 

They get much worse than that.

The other day I recieved a letter from someone who said he was from Indonesia and had come to regard his life objective to help others. He was also a millionaire and was dying of cancer. He tried to donate his money to charitable institutions but somehow couldn't do it and he proposed to give it to me in order that I distribute the money in Europe.

Well, it was much more pathetic than this. But I felt the sudden wish to answer and tell him I was sorry, but I was dying of cancer myself. I refrained just in time!

 

AT - that plugin you have to install is usually much worse than a virus. It changes your dial up networking settings (if you use dialup) to some premium international number that they make a killing out of.

RdS - yours sounds like a variation on the Nigerian "419" scams.

Michael.

 

Mmm. What does it do? And what would it do if I answered it?

Regards,

 

RDS,

The nigerian scam was pretty well reported in the press about 6 months ago.
In short, you receive and e-mail from a chap who states that he's trying to move £1 billion in currency from Nigeria to another country and wants some assitance. He offers something like 2% as proft (i.e. about £20 millon).
The initial responses seem genuine, and then he asks for something like £5k to deal with the bank transfer.

Chances are that anyone mug enough to actually volunteer the £5k will then never see or here from him again.

 

I wouldn't touch it with your's. . . . .

A good place to view the latest Scam o Rama, or The Lads from Lagos offerings.

Auric:MILD:

 

It gets much worse than that. If someone is stupid enough to pay the first £5K they keep inventing more and more bogus charges and excuses why they need "just an extra £10K" before everything is sorted. It's quite astounding how many people just keep paying out - strung along by their greed for the £20m.

In the worst case people have actually gone to Nigeria and been kidnapped whilst their money is bled dry but that didn't happen often and AFAIK no-one was killed over one of these scams yet.

See: http://www.fbi.gov/majcases/fraud/fraudschemes.htm#nigerian

Now the scams have gone beyond just Nigeria to pretty much anywhere.

Michael.

 

AT, so you go on filthy sites and give your email out. Shame on you :lol:

 

Lol I think I get so much spam because I have loads of websites with my email address on. I am very very careful what I sign up to now

 

Class! I've just read -
http://www.scamorama.com/count-garuba.html

I recieved many of these kind of e-mails - so, I've emailed one of them to that guy ([email protected]) - but I've just got an NDR back saying his mailbox is over quota...sigh, will try again...

 

IME, the amount of spam email you get depends on two things:

1) Your email provider

e.g. I've got 3 main email addresses with 3 different providers, 2 of them never receive spam, whereas my hotmail one gets spammed all the time.

2) How obvious or common your user name is

e.g. If your user-id was johnsmith then I'd imgine you would get spammed all the time.


Anyone get junk text messages delivered to their mobiles? I've had 1 (the same message each time) which kept on coming to me week after week for a couple of months informing me that someone had been trying to contact me to inform me of a big cash prize that I'd won - ring 09xxxxxx to claim the prize. And one I received this week informing me that someone I know is trying to contact me through a dating agency (I'm not registered with any dating agencies) is trying to contact me - again phone 09xxxxx to find out. How thick do these people think we are. Seeing as any number starting 09 is going to cost a minimum of 50p per minute to ring, if not 2 GBP or more in somecases.

 

yeah, also with spam, they'll get a hold of an e-mail address within an org (who will normally follow a convention like - firstname.lastname@...) then they'll use software like atomic mail sender to fire out shitloads of e-mails to just about every permatation of that said convention...!

 

of course they'll receive loads of NDR's, but if they have a 50% success rate (or whatever) then they'll be happy..

 

Hmm, is that a commercially available software package?

I suspect that do exactly the same for the bulk SMSs they send out to phones as well. :gatling:

 

yeah, do a search (I'm heading off home, haven't time to look myself) - but they do a sms version too!

 

Email spamming scripts are very easy to write in PHP so I am guessing that is how they are doing it. Also I read a report saying that 80% of web users do not use a proper firewall which is a huge security risk as the recent viruses have shown as worms can infect your computer and retreive all your addresses stored in outlook and then store them on their database.

 

My e-mail provider (which is separate from my ISP) is FastMail.fm and they use Spam Assassin which is a rules based system that is highly effective at getting rid of spam and it also uses Bayes filtering which "learns" about new spamming techinques and soon filters them out automagically.

Even though I have given out my e-mail address to some, ahem, not so reputable websites :shame: I still get virtually no spam (but I know they're sending me loads because if I turn off the spam filtering I get thousands). The Spam Assassin/Bayes systems are also very good at not getting false positives (ie rejecting real e-mails as spam).

FWIW if you're looking for a new e-mail provider I can HIGHLY recommend FastMail.fm. I've not seen anything else that get's even close. You don't have to change your e-mail address either as it will pick up mail from other accounts (including Hotmail) and apply all the same filtering etc. logic to it before it lands in your FastMail inbox. The flexibility and configurability of FastMail is superb.

Michael.

 

such as ZeroGain (Home of the Wanker TM), presumably

 

You can get so much for just your e-mail address these days.

 

That service looks good, the free account says:

10 MB storage space
40 MB bw/month
IMAP/Web access
45 day no activity period
Taglines on emails
Ads in the web-interface
(no pop-ups)

Will I also get the junk filtering with this? I will probably sign up and if its good I may get the paid account to remove the tag lines.