419 scams

This is a new one for me,

I just recieved an email cc and response purporting to be from a customer and a photographer.

Normally my first impulse it to hit the Junk mail button but I read these ones. The first one is seems to be from a customer complaining about photos not being delivered, and demanding access to the digital files by a specific date or else legal proceedings will be undertaken.

The response is from the photographer apologizing and organising to send a disk of images and have the client choose those they would like printed.

I was cc'ed in on the exchange, but the email address for the photographer uses the extension .co.za

why on earth a zimbabwean photographer's customer would cc me in on anything is beyond me so it is a scam, but they have gone to a lot of effort to make it look believable!

Probably a lot of trouble for the first one but then the copies are probably sent to thousands and it only takes a couple to make it worthwhile.

I had one a while back about how someone had paid me for an item with paypal on ebay and were demanding I send the item they had not received or legal action would be taken. I hadn't sold anything on ebay in over a year so it was very easy to spot, aside from the fact that it ended up in an email account that I don't use for ebay or paypal.

I think the threat of legal action is what scares a handful of people into responding and even if they don't get scammed for money, there goes their email address to a lot of other scammers.

I had one earlier this month. A girl called Anahit from Armenia wrote to me (in rather poor French) asking if we wanted to be friends. It was charming and looked very believable.

So I wrote back saying no that wasn't a good idea but how did you get my mail adress etc. Another adorable mail plus photos of a completely credible young woman. After a while I fed the details she'd given me into Google and came up with a report on a site dedicated to 419 scams. Exit. Black list.

There is one originating out of India that is suckering a lot of people in Australia at the moment. One of the differences is that they use a call centre so are actually phoning people. The other is that they all but claim to be microsoft. They have called my home a couple of times, but each time I wasn't there and my wife answered. Eventually they called back and I spoke to them. Basically what they do is say your computer is infected with spyware. The then talk you through how too look up the system processes and the event logs as "proof" of the infection. The next step is that they want to charge you money to remotely fix the issue. If you are suckered they will typically use remote desktop to "fix" the issue and sometimes install rogue applications at this point so they can contiue scamming you. The funny thing about that for me is that the person on the other phone A didn't quite get it that I work with the registry and logs so not only do I actually understand what they mean, but even better I run Macs at home so the problems they were describing aren't actually possible! The whole time I was talking to them I figured hey the longer they chat to me the fewer suckers they can talk to. The call dropped out about 4 or 5 times. Initially I started telling them what you are saying can't be true because of X Y Z. but they wouldn't listen so eventually I just played along and said I was doing what they asked despite actually doing nothing. Eventually the call dropped out and they gave up calling back, although apparantly while I was at work yesterday they tried again (over a month later) and my wife said to them try back after hours when my husband is home.