Thursday, April 27, 2006

Scam self checks

Brilliant links for the day.
Scam self check
Scam reply generator

You are Susan Gezi.Your father was killed by a planned motor accident. He was the former Zimbabwean Minister for Youth & Gender Equality. You have $22,000,000 to share.  You want to assure me this transaction is 100% risk free.
Which Nigerian spammer are You?

And statistics rule

Interesting ....
a site of mine gets an interesting amount of visitor from Nigeria (pbr.linkserve.net (195.166.237.40)) . Among the last one someone got from here. Deficient. At least get a bit more creative, you lazy Nigerian scammers. Emails of engineers @hotmail.com, @yahoo.com, @zwallet.com etc? Dream on. How about searching this or this search instead?

As I need a break today at least I found something interesting in Scamorama.
And some other people get as many propositions to become rich as I do #2 #3, and more on Useni brothers.
And more cool stuff.
This is a brilliant article, with a bunch of the emails of the scammers visible too.

And, I will entertain myself at Scamorama.

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Is this a scam or the deal of a lifetime?

No matter how stupid (or clever) you may be, here's a pretty much fool-proof test you can can do next time an African president offers to share 33 million Dollars with you.

With most scams, the person writing the mail pretends that you have been chosen for some special reason. They claim to have received your contact details via a chamber of commerce (see the previous blog entry), a trusted business associate or some other reputable source. Obviously these are big deals. President Ungaka Mbotu Taylor doesn't trust just anyone with this kind of transaction. With this in mind, he is fairly likely to have chosen you because of your trustworthy reputation.

After reading the crudely written email you should be fairly certain that it's a scam. If not, then here's the best test.

Ask the president if he know's your name?

Remember that in most cases, the spammers just capture the email address and not the name that had been associated with it. A genuine person would likely know your name and a bit more about you. A scammer is not likely to know your name at all.

A great way to waste a scammer's time is to dwell on the question of how they found you? Ask them in great detail who it was who passed on your email address. Play along, tell them how excited you are and that you are proud that your reputation has spread as far as the Sudannese refugee camps (that also happen to have fax services and a T1 line).