I had something like this purportedly from someone trying to trace his family tree. I have no idea whether it was the lead-in for a scam or just someone who didn’t know that this isn’t how you trace your family tree.
Wow - not sure I ever saw the update on that one, but it’s a very clear example of how the scammers will keep on pumping the victim to throw good money after bad.
As stated its really just variations on the same con.
My sergeant was trying to sell an item on Craig’s List. He got an offer that rang his internal alarm but decided to play along. He received a check and instructions to cash it then send on a portion to a factor who will arrange transportation. He called the bank that the check was supposedly from and of course found that the check was fake. He is now getting emails accusing him of stealing this guy’s money. Its basically impossible to track the guy down to charge him but we are going to use the check and correspondence for the fraud presentations we do for the public.
A different twist - a couple of years ago, I got several emails from a marketing firm in Ohio saying that I’d won $500 and they wanted my street address so they could send me a pre-paid Visa card.
I ignored and deleted several of these messages, assuming it was a scam. But he was persistent, so I googled the number and it was a legit marketing company. So I contacted the individual by phone (he included a phone number in the email) and apparently I’d filled out a brief online survey and had, really, won $500. All he needed was an address to mail it to.
Like most people here I keep my BS detector set to stun, but I’m glad I followed up!
Overpayment scams are a different animal from 419 scams - though there are many variations on both (and it wouldn’t surprise me to see both used in concert).
This one actually almost got me (didn’t click on anything, although I did google the link). It was from a “funeral home” saying that someone I knew had died.
The scam pulls on your heartstrings. Now it seems pretty blatant, but a couple weeks ago? I had never run into this before. It’s a pretty fucking shitty thing to do.
Yeah, lately I’ve been getting emails from a funeral home about the loss of a loved one. Curious thing, they seem to forget to mention the NAME of the corpse. But there’s a link they want me to click on. Not a chance.
Oh, and lots of the spam wants personal information. Besides your name, address, and phone number, they want your banking information and sometimes a photo copy of your passport.
This reminds me of a contest that Chase Bank had several years ago. Basically, they had a flaw in the way the contest was set up that gave anyone who used the no-purchase-necessary alternative means of entry a 76% chance of winning $500 if they made the maximum number of allowed entries.
This was revealed on several deal discussion boards. So people entered the contest. A few months after the contest was over, the independent judging company started sending out mail to the winners asking them to sign a form attesting they were over 18 and complied with the rules in order to claim their prizes. The boards were then filled with posts from the same people who had just spend two months entering this contest proclaiming “CHASE BANK SCAM ALERT!!!”
Some of the people just assumed the letters must be a scam. Others took a copy of the letter down to their local Chase Bank branch where the lobby banker told them something like “I’ve never heard of ABC Judging Company. This must be some sort of scam.”
I just scrawled something that looked like my name at the bottom of the form and sent it back. They already had my address, what were they going to do to me? A few months later I got a check for $500, cashed it, and all was well.
Funnily enough the survey I filled out (I don’t usually do surveys) was embedded in a local news story about banking, when First Merit bank was taking over a local bank - Citizens. I had opinions since Citizens was my bank for years and I wasn’t happy about the merger, so I filled out the survey.
Oddly enough, I now bank with Chase. But they have yet to give me $500.
of course you don’t have any kinfolk there. They just died!!!
And if you click the link, you’ll get all the money in their will. Go ahead, do it! What could go wrong.?
I still get a half dozen scam emails in my hotmail account every day; every now and again, I still toy with them.
At the moment, I just reply :
In most cases, that’s the end of the conversation, but once in a while, the scammer will try to protest his innocence - yesterday, the response I got from one was:
(I just replied asking if his mother knows he’s a criminal, and that was the end of it).
Previously to this scheme, I played a different game, comprising:
[ul]
[li]Reply to the initial email, sounding interested and stupid (this gets you past the first line of bulk spammers and there will usually be a secondary contact email)[/li][li]Add the primary and secondary addresses to a list (kept locally in a text doc)[/li][li]Reply to the email, copying all of the scammers on the list, saying “Fucking idiot scammer”[/li][/ul]
Because the reply-all list snowballs into something quite big, you quickly get scammers doing a reply-all, protesting their innocence; this email goes to all the other scammers on the list. The effect - I think - is that the scammers abandon these email addresses. They probably set up another one straight away, but maybe in the process, this disrupts the chain of contact with an innocent victim or two.
