I recall a submission by a guy who kept a jar at his desk with a sign, Please help Israel’s children. He collected quite a few dollars until someone noticed the name plate he also had on his desk. It was submitted by Ted Israel.
Every so often when I hear of some internet scam where people are duped into sending money or gift cards for non-existent charities, investment schemes, etc. I wish that I weren’t an honest person. Think of all the opportunities to make money that I’ve missed out on!
I have the secret on how to dupe people while remaining an honest person.
You know what to do.
How much for the secret, what sort of payment should I use, and where should I send it?
All I need are your bank account details and password. I’ll do the rest.
It’s the stories about “the IRS” wanting you to buy Home Depot gift cards to pay off your tax penalty that blow my mind.
Or sending payment by way of Western Union/MoneyGram to someone in Nigeria.
How are we supposed to vote for Kamala Harris when she mangles English so badly?
It worked with pennies…
Oh my gosh, that’s true!
(U of I campus, late '80s: “See that dude over there? With the hat? HE’S THE PENNY GUY!”)
Found in a little-used inbox this morning:
You have received this message because your card was used to make a payment at apple .com, $1738.96. Did you authorize this activity? please click the cancel payment button below to decline transaction if you did not make this payment. This message has been automatically generated to notify you of this transaction.
N.B: If you’re seeing this message in your spam/junk email folder ensure to move this email to your inbox email folder to enable the cancel payment button below clickable for you to cancel payment and secure your account.
(appledotcom link broken, though it does seem legit.)
Needless to say, the link for the “Cancel Payment” button is almost but not quite entirely unlike anything related to the bank in question. Where I’ve never had any kind of account.
I will give them credit for relative coherence (and only one missed capitalization).
This English is so broken you practically need tape to put it back together.
The CANCEL PAYMENT button, at best, would require you to enter your cc details and it may try to convince you that you need to make a payment to cancel a payment.
As a side note, many 3rd party companies that process payments or travel reservations have a feature that allows vendors that use their service to communicate directly with their customers.
Scammers can gain access to this feature, and it lets them send messages ( and in the case of PayPal, invoices ) that are sent directly from the legitimate e-mail address or internal message system.
PayPal and booking .com seem to be the two biggest offenders. PayPal is probably the worst, it’s trivially easy to send anyone a PayPal invoice for anything, and put a scam message and fake phone number in the Notes field.
The booking .com version requires the scammer to trick the hotel into installing malware, usually by sending an inquiry e-mail that includes a malicious link. Once the hotel system is infected, the scammers send e-mails to customers with booking .com reservations that come directly from the booking .com e-mail address, requesting cc info and, in some cases, payment.
These two sites seem to be the worst offenders for the fake e-mail from a legit address scams, although I’ve seen scammers target a similar feature on Etsy lately.
I’m selling a desk on Craigslist. So far, the only response I’ve received is:
I’m currently out of town at the moment… I will mail you a cashier check and my movers will come for pickup as soon as the check clears, I will add $50 to the sale for the hold.
What’s your mailing address and what name can I make the check payable to?
I simply ignored this, but I was tempted to reply “I’ve got a better idea. You send the check to your movers, and they can pay me in cash when they pick it up.”
Which could be the start of a beautiful friendship chaotic scambait ending in cursing scammers.
Strange. This time “Publishers Clearinghouse” is having me mail $17,750.00 in cash hidden inside a book to “Donna B*udreaux” in Florida. I’ll be going to the post office first thing in the morning,
One of the best scambaits of all time was the P-P-P-Powerbook! incident. Short version:
- Seller in the US tries to sell laptop on eBay.
- Scammer in UK offers to buy item outside of eBay, using a fake escrow service.
- Seller smells a scam, but agrees to the deal.
- When scammer “deposits money” in the “escrow service”, seller assembles and ships a fake Powerbook, consisting of a three-ring binder with some keyboard keys glued to one surface and a monitor and ports drawn on other surfaces.
- International shipments to UK require the shipper to declare a value so that the appropriate import tax can be charged to the receiving party. Seller declares a value such that the scammer has to pay 350 pounds to receive the P-P-P-Powerbook.
- Through watching the FedEx tracking info, email updates from the scammer, and an actual international network of spies, seller confirmed that scammer paid the tax and received the package. In other words, not only did the seller not get ripped off, he managed to cost the scammer 350 pounds.
- Scammer tried to email a virus to the seller, but seller was well-protected and did not suffer any inconvenience or loss.
That’s awesome.
Buy book from used bookstore. (with luck, you find a book with an appropriate title) Instead of money, include a note warning the receiver that she’s a money mule. Or cuss her out for being a scammer.
I didn’t want to pay the postage for a book so I ripped the big manila envelope down the side and taped it back up so it looks like it was tampered with. I did include a note that this was the money for the Publishers Clearinghouse taxes and fees. I told them to call the scammer if they had any questions and included his number. Also included was an extra envelope I found in the trash addressed to the money mule from the previous Publishers Clearinghouse scam. That might cause some confusion. And a wrapper from a frozen pizza just for good luck. I am going to tell the scammer that I don’t have a receipt because the computer was down at the post office and I had to send it by first class mail instead of overnight express and that would actually be faster because the post office won’t get their computer fixed until next week.
