In order to enforce this contract that scammers tricked you into by recording a single word out of context, they would have to be prepared to stand up in court. Scammers generally seem sort of resistant to that kind of thing.
Also, if it was that easy, surely they could just as easily present the word ‘No’ (or anything else they wanted) as affirmation by altering the question. “Are you rejecting my deal?”. “No”. “Thank you very much sir”
I’ve had people tell me that I shouldn’t say anything affirmative to a scammer in an email because they might copy and paste it into a contract. That’s right, copy and paste the three letters Y, E and S out of my email, into a contract, and that will somehow obligate me to do something.
Yeah, that’s the only version of this that makes sense. The false threat of enforcement of a supposed contract, not anything that would actually carry any weight.
That seems par for the course. Someone sent Mrs. Cad a scam check. We didn’t fall for it but I contacted
The police where the scam originated
The FBI since it was across state lines
USPS since it used the US mail system
Exactly zero of them cared.
Probably should have notified the bank the check was drawn on but I have a feeling that would have just made it 0 out of 4.
I am very happy to read from you today, thank you very much for your
mail. How are you doing over there in your country, I hope you are
fine. As my heart directed me to contact you, I believe I have found a
good friend in you. About myself, my name is Rebecca. Halstead, I’m
24 years old, never married. I’m from Sudan in Africa but now
living in St Louis Catholic Orphanage home here in Dakar Senegal due
to the civil war in my country. My late father Mr. Steven Halstead
was in politics and also a contractor, he supported the ruling
government before the rebels attacked my family one morning, killing
my father and my mother with my two younger brothers. It is only me
who is alive now because I was in school doing my first year in social
science at the University of Sudan when this happened. l managed to run to
this country Senegal where l am staying now. In this female hostel
where I live, we are only allowed to go out on a few days of the
week. It is like staying in prison. I don’t have anyone to go to, my
relatives ran away during the war. The only person that I go to here
is Rev. Fred Martins who is a reverend father here and he allows me to
check my mail with the computer in his office. He is like a father to
me because he has been very good to me here. The Reverend’s Phone
number is ( +221774185740) if you call and tell him you want to speak
with me Rebecca, he will send for me from the hostel to answer you.
I want to come out of here and to come over to your country and to
finish my study. Please listen to this, my late father when he was
alive deposited ($4.6m) four million six hundred thousand US dollars in
a bank in Europe with my name as the next of kin. I have his
certificate of Deposit and death certificate here with me. I want you
to help me transfer this money to your account in your country so that
you can also send me some money from there for me to get my traveling
documents and air ticket to come over there to meet with you because I
have nothing with me here to do anything. I don’t want to go back
because I’m afraid of the enemies and the Government that murdered my
family, that was also why I am here now. I keep this secret from others
here, I don’t want them to know who I am or what I have. Please I
will also like you to keep it to yourself and don’t tell anyone.
I am afraid of losing my life and the money if people know about it.
I’m telling you all this about myself with trust, hoping you can help
me. Please I want you to understand my situation here.
I really need your help, please if you can help me. I like honest,
understanding, and God-fearing people. My hobbies are music, reading,
writing, etc. I have attached my picture for you, hoping to see
yours. My favorite language is English. Please, I will like it if you
can call me for us to speak. Think about me and my situation here,
please not just for fun. Have a nice day, hoping to hear from you soon
Best wishes
Rebecca. Halstead
.
“She” attached “her” picture. Looks like she’s in a real hellhole.
(Google Lens matched to a bunch of catalog pages)
If anyone cares, a bunch of the world’s smartest scambaiters are having a week of fun together right now. They are actively trying to prevent gullible people from losing money, and in some cases, refunding lost funds.
You can watch the activity in real-time. Since the scambaiters can’t always reach the victims before too late, watching is sometimes more suspenseful than a horror movie; you don’t know if these poor people will wise up in time or lose their entire life savings.
If it comes down to the believability of crooks vs. whitehat hackers, it’s a cops & robbers game, or perhaps a feds vs. moonshiners. Win some, lose some.
A new one. The United Nations needs me to help disburse 670K to refugees. (they’re getting cheap). I’m sent a form to fill out(in JPG format) and of course, I can’t figure out how to fill out an image file. Neither can the scammers. I’m told to print it, fill it out and send it back. Since you can’t email a printed form, there’s only one way.
How is it possible they can be this stupid and still scam people?
Thanks for your kind response, the form has not yet been completed.Your Nationality and photograph and occupation and also your mobile number and date of birth…
The idiots are still demanding I fill out the form they sent. They don’t understand that you can’t fill out an image file (Yeah, I know how) or they don’t know how to explain it.
They finally figured out that they need to tell me to put the personal details [Mangetout] “You know, the kind of personal details you never give to a stranger on the internet”[/Mangetout]. However, they said they wanted Photography(they meant photo ID) so they got Photography, a bunch of old beach photos from when I lived in Aptos.
There was a long enough delay after this, I thought it was finished.
Nope. They wanted $500 wire transferred to a money mule. Fake did that, this morning they’re whining that it hasn’t arrived. No kidding.
So far, roughly 6 hours and 38 emails(both ways) in.
Yeah, there really aren’t that many viable ways for the average citizen to report scams that are taking place in email or other online conversations, across international borders. I get a lot of people telling me ‘you should report this! Why didn’t you report it?!?!’
Whenever I try to unpick what they mean, it turns out they imagine you can just email the police in another country and hand over some fragments of email conversation with a scammer, and that would result in anything other than wasted time.
Just like the fire service doesn’t have an email to write to when your house is on fire, police services generally don’t have much in the way of mailboxes where you can anonymously just forward some email and have them treat it seriously. I mean, if they did, imagine the time and effort that would be wasted to trolls and other false reports.
In the instances where I have baited scammers far enough to get them to reveal a bank account they want me to pay money into, I report this to the bank. Pretty much anything else is futile, unless you have existing connections with law enforcement that can be used to turn it into an investigation.
I’ve gotten a couple of accounts here in the States where I’ve forwarded the entire chain of emails to the bank security department only to be told they only deal with victims’ claims and to stop engaging with scammers.
Yeah, ultimately, that’s what anyone in any position of authority is likely to want: for people to recognise scams and reject them.
Some banks do seem to welcome third party reports of suspicious activity, but I don’t think that necessarily means they do anything with the information. If some complete stranger reports my own (perfectly legit) account as suspicious, I want my bank to ignore that report, or at least not waste too much time on it.
And likewise with police and other authorities - if they set up feed-in points for scambaiters to hand off scammers to them, this would encourage vigilantes to go sticking their noses into organised crime, and it would also be wide open to abuse.
One time (under pressure from some guy in the comments who would not relent), I reported one of the scammers I was baiting to Action Fraud - the UK reporting service for Cyber Crime. I was only able to complete about a quarter of the fields on the form, because I didn’t know any physical addresses, only emails, and when it came to reporting how much I had lost, I could only truthfully answer zero.
The case was closed without investigation on the grounds that there was not enough material to work on. I was offered counselling.
The main problem is that I was not a victim of crime. There was someone attempting to commit a crime, but they had not succeeded. Now the ‘attempted’ versions of many crimes are still prosecutable, but not generally these, where there is little or no evidence to work on and the scammer is a faint trail of dust, somewhere a long way away.
