Back in business
I’m back to regular programming at the boston.com blog. This one will take a bit longer, but please hang in there.
In the meantime, I must share with you the worst spamscam ever. This one got past my regular account’s spam filter. The subject line is “Get back to me ASAP” and the sender is “false.” (No, really.) The body of the text goes like this:
I hope you receive this message on time ? Sorry I didn’t inform you about my trip to the UK England for a program,I am presently in England,something extremely dreadful happened to me,I was mugged at gun point on my way to the Hotel by some Hoodlums and they made away with my Bag and other valuables. I called my bank for a wire transfer but it has proven almost Impossible to operate my account from here as they made me understand international transactions take 7 working days to be effective which i can’t wait.
I feel so devastated,now my passport and other belongings are been retained by the hotel management pending the time I pay my hotel bills.This is shameful,I need you to help me with a loan of (1,850 pounds= $3,350) to pay my hotel bills and get my self home.I will reimburse you soon as I get back Home.I will appreciate whatever you can assist me with.Can you help?
All hopes on you
Bob
I have to wonder: how would anyone who could fall for this have accumulated $3,350 to begin with?
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Someone hacked into the email account of an acquaintance on mine and I got a message very similar to that. It came to me under his address- it went to everyone in his address book under his address. I was able to tell for sure that it was a fake because I don’t know him well enough that he would contact me if he were indeed in this type of a situation, and I also knew for a fact that he was not over seas. :(
Hoodlums! I love that word.
I remember fairly recently, one of my friends’ Facebook statuses was something like “I am not in England, I did not get mugged, and I do not need $5000.”
The same thing happened to my personal e-mail address… unfortunately for the hacker, my work address was part of my address book, so I was able to click “reply all” and immediately alert my friends and family that this was a scam.
The best part? Several friends wrote back to say that they knew it couldn’t be me because I would never send a message with such grave spelling and punctuation errors!
I also got one, hacked, from a friend’s address. Someone who might have been in England and who I would have helped if she’d needed it (and someone who is given to typos, even), and didn’t include such obvious likely falsehoods as “mugged at gunpoint” (which is very uncommon in the UK).
It was both scammy enough and reasonable enough that I would have double-checked with some mutual friend to see if it might possibly be true, had it not been that she was not someone who would have sent such a request to her entire address list, including the three email lists we are both on.
It’s apparently quite common. In fact, it must be a similar one to this:
http://science-professor.blogspot.com/2009/10/not-you.html
–that I blogged about a while back. The giveaway in that spam, amusingly, was that it was too polite and cogent to have come from the person in question.
My husband is, in fact, in the UK, and does put all his hopes on me, but I knew this did not come from him because
1. He had informed me of the trip,
2. His name is not Bob,
3. If he had been mugged at gun point by Hoodlums and started, writing like this, as a result, it would imply that not only had he lost his Bag but also a goodly chunk of brain matter, in which case he would be in a Hospital and I would have been informed by his traveling companions.
That’s so funny – I just got this exact same email today from someone I haven’t spoken to in years. However, because he is an ex-boyfriend who was always mooching off me, I thought it seemed plausible! (but no, I didn’t send him any money!)