We’ll see what happens next - I addressed him as ‘Dike’ because these scammers always seem uncertain about which parts of the name are forename and surname.
Last year I had an ad up on Craigslist and I got a gibberish response from “sean S. marine.” I decided to have some fun with it. Here’s our correspondence, verbatim:
Me:
Hi,
I would be very happy to sell to you. However, I have one
requirement: I will only sell to buyers who are gay.
In order to buy it, you will have to prove to me somehow that you
are gay. How will you do this? Please let me know. His response:
Well i dont know how to prove it to you may be you create a yahoo Id
and we chat online with that youn will believe am gay…waitting
to read from you ssonest…
Thanks love
Me:
Hi,
Just give me a short list of some men whom you find attractive. Actors, baseball
players, popular singers - any men who you find to be sexy. Just list 4 or 5 men who you think are attractive. That’s all you need to do.
His response:
Hello,
Brad Bite, beckham ,usher raymon, R kelly,mase.waitting to read from you
soonest.Sorry for my late response.
Thanks.
Wow. I assume by Brad Bite, he meant Brad Pitt. This was a truly hilarious incident - I can’t believe it went as far as it did.
@Mangetout Interesting, you have been promoted up the line, the first Email was from a catcher, the second Email is a lot less pathetic.
I used to ‘bait’ but gave it up as they really made me get vicious, at one time I tried to turn it round and tried to buy volunteers for medical experiments. I was curious how far they would go and reckoned spreading FUD was reasonable revenge.
The Mike Dike bit is because they use names from other people they have corresponded with - and my guess is someone has used that name on them.
If you don’t know it then have a look at www.419eater.com (especially the forum) however I suspect you know that site rather well - I could even be trying to teach Shiver how to suck eggs
Good luck with this scambaiting, Mangetout. You’ve had some amusing counterscams in the past.
If you can play this one out long enough, may I suggest an end game? Have them email a full specification of everything that was discussed, including their real contact information, to wfoectf (at) einformation (dot) usss (dot) gov – this is the Secret Service’s Washington field office for electronic crimes.
And, if so, thanks for doing so; this stuff is hilarious.
Don’t you know it’s not proper to go this far before a third e-mail exchange. Don’t you have any morals?
Did anyone see the MSNBC broadcast the other night (first time?) where the Predator show guy goes to London to screw around with and out Nigerian scammers? As much I seem to be concerned about the entrapment issues raised in the predator shows (not for discussion here, please), I was all for what he did to these scammers. Those were hilarious also.
No reply from Mike Dike yet, but I’ve had another email from another scammer arrive in a different inbox; this one has to be seen to be believed:
I’m going to tell Mike Dike that my real name is Mrs Susana Benson, and tell Mrs Susana Benson that my name is Mike Dike, then give them each other’s email addresses - unfortunately I will of course not be able to witness the confusion that may arise between them, but we can imagine…
The attached ‘documents’ were a complete joke; they’re tiny, fuzzy little jpegs - look: document 1 document 2 document 3
-the third document bears a fake rubber stamp proclaiming ‘ORIDINAL’ - I’m going to see if I can get him to send bigger versions of the documents, because I bet they’re riddled with silly spelling.
The txt shorthand is interesting. I just need to wait for a reply from Kevin Clark and then I’m good to go:
-Email Mike Dike telling him to contact me on Susana’s email address
-Email Susana telling her to contact me on Mike’s address
-Email Kevin telling him I’m Susana Benson and that Mike Dike is my legal representative, providing both email addresses.