Mütter, Mütter, Mütter

[elfs]

I got this email today:

i am now not going to have to call you on the phone because i can drive you crazy with my emails. This will be a short one just to give you my email address. love mom

Well, that's interesting. Do I give her the address of this blog?

I'm thinking yes. We're both adults.

Comments

[omahas.livejournal.com]

Trust me. We're only awaiting the day now when we get this:

"Dear, I received this email from this poor man in Nigeria, and he was so in need and he had all this money that he couldn't get out because of these horrible people but he chose me to help him out I don't know why and I thought "why not" because I could be helpful and get some extra money at the same time so I sent him the $10,000 and now he won't talk to me..."

sigh.

[maellenkleth]

Is it solely my imagination, or has the frequency of those scam-letters declined lately?

[omahas.livejournal.com]

I don't know whether they've declined so much as become diversified. I've noticed some very interesting versions on the theme, including one where the sender tried to claim that they were a civil rights advocate that had gotten stranded London, while attending conferences on AIDS, civil rights abuses in Africa, Poverty seminars, and a few other things that were all meant to hit your advocacy soft spot. But, oh, he had lost his luggage, and had no money, and needed help to be able to get back to the states where his money was, and if you'd just wire him some cash...

Heh.

They're trying to become more creative.

[maellenkleth]

Indeed, heh.

What surprises me, in a risk-analysis sort of way, is that the spammers have not yet started spoofing messages from addresses captured by traffic sniffing of one's outbound mailstream, with message subjects cobbled together by rearrangement of a list of keywords from outgoing messages. You'd think that the rate of clickthrough / positive-response on those faked messages would be higher.

a somewhat privileged position?

[(Anonymous)]

Um, maybe people in a position to monitor your email traffic to that extent have better ways to make money?

On the other hand, I have read an account about a scammer using a social networking site (such as Facebook) to get some information about a target's friends, which the scammer used to try to impersonate a friend of the target when begging for emergency cash.

In this particular account, the target didn't quite fall for it.

Re: a somewhat privileged position?

[maellenkleth]

Heh, it might play out like that from time to time. I do note the same couple standing alongside the exit from Fry's parking lot in Renton, with a nicely-scrawled cardboard sign declaring: "Stranded! Need gas to get home! Please help!" from day to day: four times now in the past couple of months that I have been there and have seen them.

Wonder how much money they clear that way?

[(Anonymous)]

I heard of one recently where, after a successful scam, the scammers wrote back to the mark claiming to be the FBI agents investigating the incident, and saying that a small "filing fee" was necessary to add her case to the investigation...

Anonymous Blog Reader #127

[maellenkleth]

Oh, that's rich! And on the third hand, maybe the reason why the spammers have not become more sophisticated is that their current functional model is collecting enough stupid victims as it is, without requiring the input of additional programming labour to upgrade their mailing methodology.