I just got a Nigerian-style scam via PM

User ID is: danielsunho

It says this:

I got it too. Same message. Same user.

I got it too. I forwarded the message to a couple of Moderators.

I am wondering what a Plan Crash is.

Raises hand. me too.

I’ve banned this user. Thank you all for reporting this.

But wait! What if it’s true? Why didn’t I get a share in the funds? You jerks! : )

Easy. His plan crashed because you were all too smart to fall for it. :smiley:

Exactly, when the son of the deposed king of Nigeria emails you directly, asking for help, you help! His father ran the freaking country! Ok?
ETA, I got it too.

Actually, I was thinking of these scams the other (partly since I see Duvalier has some US lawyers working with him in Haiti to get him money back…former Congressman Bob Barr has no shame). Anyway, my question was: has a fictional movie ever been made featuring one of these scams? I always thought a great comedy movie could be made from this idea.

I didn’t even know that Bank of Africa had a branch in the Lebanoon.

I didn’t get a pm. Nobody loves me. :frowning:

I guess he knew I couldn’t afford it, and didn’t bother with me.

Jinx, Tahssa!

Neither did I. Probably read some of my posts and realized I’m too smart to fall for it. :cool:

I got it, and by the time I was at a computer to report it he was already banned.

I can’t believe there are people stupid enough to fall for this.

Ugh. PM spammers are a huge pain in the ass because by the time they get reported and you ban them, there’s already spam sitting in a bunch of people’s inboxes, so they still accomplish their mission of spreading illiteracy and irritation.

If this starts happening more often, I recommend the admins set up a dual Guest usergroup system like I describe in this thread. It’s easy to set up, and completely cuts off the PM spammers at the knees.

No relation.

I think it would make sense to have a vBulletin option for ‘ban and delete all outgoing unread PMs’. But maybe they haven’t implemented anything like that yet.

There’s a forum I frequent that put new users in a special group that requires their first X posts to be OK’d my a mod before they are posted. I assume PM’s were disabled as well. The problem with this was that they didn’t tell new users. When I made my first post, I ended up making it 3 or 4 times over an hour or so followed by several emails to mods and admins trying to figure out why it wasn’t showing up.
Funny thing is, it’s a very very quiet little forum buried in the bowels of the internet. It’s a support message board for a website building program. Even though there are people there with thousands of posts and they do have busy times (with new people) when there’s a software release, overall, I’d guess they see 20 or so posts per day. A spammer could nice little bit of excitement for them.

Yeah, I think requiring explicit moderation of a new user’s posts is huge overkill. Most PM spammers are way too lazy and stupid to make e.g. 10 non-spammy posts and then wait the (IIRC) 15 minutes for the server to reevaluate their usergroup status before they can start firing out PMs, they’ll just move onto another site. So just let new posters post like anyone else – the only difference in their usergroup permissions is not being able to send PMs. Most people would never even notice.

OKing all new posters is just too big a pain in the ass and it discourages new people from hanging out here. But about a year ago we started using a cool spam-catching system that diverts spam posts to a queue where we can delete them without anybody else seeing them. (Or we can approve them in the rare instances where the post is not spam after all.) It doesn’t get all the spam, but it catches everything that’s simulposted on a lot of other boards. We’ve been getting more spam lately, and without that system I think several of us would have lost our minds.