# Ugh. I know a guy who fell for an internet scam. **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [February 28, 2013, 12:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ugh-i-know-a-guy-who-fell-for-an-internet-scam/651575 "2013-02-28T00:43:56Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![FriarTed](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/friarted/32/1052_2.png) [@FriarTed](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FriarTed)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2013, 2:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ugh-i-know-a-guy-who-fell-for-an-internet-scam/651575/21 "2013-02-28T14:19:52Z")
I got the FBI virus last year, read on my laptop how to remove, and decided my best course was to have my regular computer service providers fix it. It was $100 & the lost of that computer for a week. If it had been more expensive & I had good reason to believe the payoff would fix it, I’d have been tempted. ---
**Author:** ![Hari\_Seldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hari_seldon/32/5173_2.png) [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)\ **Post date:** [March 1, 2013, 2:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ugh-i-know-a-guy-who-fell-for-an-internet-scam/651575/22 "2013-03-01T02:10:15Z")
I know a guy. He can’t be stupid because he has a first class degree from Oxford (in Anthropology). He has suffered from MS for many decades (clearly an indolent variety since he is only slightly handicapped) and my physician DIL says the disease can interfere with judgment. About 20 years he got a letter (remember letters?) from Nigeria of all places with the usual scam. So and so has $20,000,000, but needs help in getting the money out. So they offered Nick some millions if he would just send them $150,000 (I kid you not)… He actually visited Nigeria and came away convinced. he mortgaged his house and sent them the money. About ten years ago. Eventually his wife had him declared incompetent and took over the finances. But then she died. Now he lives with his daughter and is back in contact with the Nigerians. Unbelievable. ---
**Author:** ![choie](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/choie/32/7829_2.png) [@choie](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/choie)\ **Post date:** [March 1, 2013, 8:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ugh-i-know-a-guy-who-fell-for-an-internet-scam/651575/23 "2013-03-01T08:14:31Z")
> [@Senegoid](#): > > Here’s a thread from several years ago, in which **choie** watches and blogs, while her neighbor get “plucked like a chicken” ([post #50](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=11516079#post11516079)) by a Nigerian scam. > > [Unwittingly dragged into the middle of a scam. Yipe! - Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share - Straight Dope Message Board](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=498879) Ha! When I saw this thread I was going to search for that thread myself, until I saw this post. It’s hilarious that you remembered this, **Senegold**. Good memory! To this day I still find myself wondering where ‘Fred’ (the victim in my sordid tale) ended up living afer getting bilked of $40K+ and getting kicked out of our building as a result. It’s just astonishing that people still fall for this. But they still fall for V!AGRA emails and patently fake “Dear customer you’re [sic] Paypal account may have been hacked! Click here to log in and give us your password and social security number to prove you’re real identity!!!” phishing attempts. Some things never change. ---
**Author:** ![Sunspace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sunspace/32/1250_2.png) [@Sunspace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sunspace)\ **Post date:** [March 1, 2013, 2:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ugh-i-know-a-guy-who-fell-for-an-internet-scam/651575/24 "2013-03-01T14:09:35Z")
> [@drewtwo99](#): > > it turned your webcam on and displayed a live image of you and everything. Very creepy. Say _what?!!_ I haven’t heard of this one. ---
**Author:** ![ralph124c](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/8797f3/32.png) [@ralph124c](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralph124c)\ **Post date:** [March 1, 2013, 3:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ugh-i-know-a-guy-who-fell-for-an-internet-scam/651575/25 "2013-03-01T15:38:00Z")
I once advertised for a position on Craigslist-every response I got was a scam attempt. I particularly like the one where they offer you $500/week to advertise something on your car (Budweiser, Red Bull, etc.). When you ask for a contact at these firms, they never reply. And yes, and email asking for your name and address is most likely an identity theft attempt…amazing how the US Congress has never gotten around to any laws against Identity Theft. ---
**Author:** ![Doctor\_Jackson](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/doctor_jackson/32/32_2.png) [@Doctor\_Jackson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Doctor_Jackson)\ **Post date:** [March 1, 2013, 8:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ugh-i-know-a-guy-who-fell-for-an-internet-scam/651575/26 "2013-03-01T20:30:48Z")
> [@Sunspace](#): > > Say _what?!!_ I haven’t heard of this one. **drewtwo99** just thought it turned on his web cam. It actually displays an animated GIF of a monkey at a keybord 😛 ---
**Author:** ![joyfool](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/df788c/32.png) [@joyfool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/joyfool)\ **Post date:** [March 1, 2013, 10:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ugh-i-know-a-guy-who-fell-for-an-internet-scam/651575/27 "2013-03-01T22:26:25Z")
I had to google a scam for a friend just this past week. Apparently, there is an email going around (earliest date I found was from mid 2010) detailing the legitimate (from multiple reputable news sources) lotto winnings of an elderly couple named the Larges. Anyway, as the story goes, they decided to give most of their winnings away to charities and such after keeping a small portion for themselves and hooking up their loved ones. According to the email, they’d decided to take this a step further and share with random people they’d discovered (although it didn’t say how beyond “research”) through the internet. Friend was chosen, luckily. 😉 All that had to be done was respond with your information, like full name, address and social security number, to their email address. Didn’t matter that the email address was from yahoo in Canada (I believe the real couple heralded from the UL). Or that _in one of the very articles it linked to_, it said in the first paragraph that, at that time (2010), ALL THE MONEY HAD ALREADY BEEN GIVEN AWAY. So, the scam was playing on people being so greedy that they wouldn’t even read beyond the title and a couple of sentences. Amazing. And what I found in searching was that the reports about it was rife with folks asking how to stop whatever would happen next, because golly gee, these people would now know where they lived, etc. etc. Sheesh. My friend just said that you never know. Ahuh. You sure the hell do if you’re not seven. ---
**Author:** ![Typo\_Negative](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/typo_negative/32/484_2.png) [@Typo\_Negative](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Typo_Negative)\ **Post date:** [March 1, 2013, 11:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ugh-i-know-a-guy-who-fell-for-an-internet-scam/651575/28 "2013-03-01T23:32:20Z")
> [@Hari\_Seldon](#): > > I know a guy. He can’t be stupid because he has a first class degree from Oxford (in Anthropology). He has suffered from MS for many decades (clearly an indolent variety since he is only slightly handicapped) and my physician DIL says the disease can interfere with judgment. My ex-wife, an edumacated woman with several degrees, was all-too-willing to fall for a scam. She has advertised a pool table for sale. This table had a marble slab and was incredibly heavy. She received a response from someone out of the country who offered the asking price and offed even more to ship it. of course, he wanted us to use a shipper HE knew. I tell her it’s a scam but sometime later we get a check in the mail. Looks legit, and is for the asking price plus 500 for shipping. I call the issuing bank. Person on the phone asks me to read off the routing numbers. I get 3 numbers in and she says ‘It’s fake, no question.’ I tell this to now ex-wife and she says…“.let’s take it to one of those check-cashing places!” :eek::eek::eek: ---
**Author:** ![drewtwo99](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/d07c76/32.png) [@drewtwo99](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/drewtwo99)\ **Post date:** [March 1, 2013, 11:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ugh-i-know-a-guy-who-fell-for-an-internet-scam/651575/29 "2013-03-01T23:48:31Z")
> [@Sunspace](#): > > Say _what?!!_ I haven’t heard of this one. Yes it was the FBI or Department of Justice one about getting caught with illegal materials. It prominently claims to have your picture on file and your address and such from the IP address. > [@Doctor\_Jackson](#): > > **drewtwo99** just thought it turned on his web cam. It actually displays an animated GIF of a monkey at a keybord 😛 …on second thought… 😛 ---
**Author:** ![tellyworth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/977dab/32.png) [@tellyworth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tellyworth)\ **Post date:** [March 1, 2013, 11:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ugh-i-know-a-guy-who-fell-for-an-internet-scam/651575/30 "2013-03-01T23:53:05Z")
> [@Typo\_Negative](#): > > I tell this to now ex-wife and she says…“.let’s take it to one of those check-cashing places!” One of the reasons scams work is that the victims think they’re outsmarting the scammers. Another is that once someone believes something to be true, facts alone usually aren’t enough to convince them otherwise. There was an item a few years back on a TV current affairs show about a victim of 419 scammers. Very lowbrow tabloid journalism, but the story was fascinating. A grandmother had lost everything she’d ever earned paying the scammers to (she believed) deliver a crate full of cash or stocks or whatever. There was always one more bribe to be payed, one more flight to charter, one more customs fee, so she’d send them another wire transfer. She’d run out of money years ago, but she told every person she ever met all about the millions of dollars she was about to deliver, and offered them a share in exchange for whatever cash they were willing to part with. Her family, neighbours, friends, former clients had collectively lost millions of dollars, and still she kept going. The journalists set up a (self-serving and awkward) sting. She got to see the police arrest the scammers, and they patiently explained how it was all a scam and the crate of cash had never existed. Five minutes later she was trying to talk the camera guy into investing, since she had another contact back in Nigeria and just needed another ten grand to get her crate full of cash delivered. ---
**Author:** ![Lanzy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/74df32/32.png) [@Lanzy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lanzy)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2013, 12:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ugh-i-know-a-guy-who-fell-for-an-internet-scam/651575/31 "2013-03-02T00:41:22Z")
The FBI virus came from at least one anime site from japan. It wasn’t that hard to remove when my son got it, just restore to a few days before and run my regular virus/trojan remover. ---
**Author:** ![detlep](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/dbc845/32.png) [@detlep](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/detlep)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2013, 10:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ugh-i-know-a-guy-who-fell-for-an-internet-scam/651575/32 "2013-03-02T22:06:18Z")
> [@Ferret\_Herder](#): > > I told them to please, please, make sure to check their credit card statements to ensure that they weren’t being charged a recurring fee (and dispute it with the bank if they were, and suggested disputing the original one too), and to bring the computer to the Geek Squad at Best Buy to make sure it was OK. I live too far away to be their free tech support, but considering Mom only retired recently and worked with computers at her job, I didn’t think they’d do something like that! Geek Squad Online is a virus in and of itself. They have, for several months, earnestly been trying to charge my CC $19.99 for a service never ordered or received. Eight phone calls to them later, a customer service rep promised me the charge would not recur. Of course 1 March, there’s the charge again. ---
**Author:** ![Napier](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/ce73a5/32.png) [@Napier](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Napier)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2013, 10:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ugh-i-know-a-guy-who-fell-for-an-internet-scam/651575/33 "2013-03-02T22:31:44Z")
We know a bunch of guys who fell for an Internet scam. The scam’s name was “umkay”. ---
**Author:** ![China\_Guy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/779978/32.png) [@China\_Guy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/China_Guy)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2013, 3:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ugh-i-know-a-guy-who-fell-for-an-internet-scam/651575/34 "2013-03-03T03:22:53Z")
My sister in law had a 6 month “relationship” with a Nigerian posing as an off shore oil rig guy. ---
**Author:** ![Harvey\_The\_Heavy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/c5a1d2/32.png) [@Harvey\_The\_Heavy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Harvey_The_Heavy)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2013, 12:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ugh-i-know-a-guy-who-fell-for-an-internet-scam/651575/35 "2013-03-03T12:29:12Z")
A co-worker of mine fell for the classic garden variety Nigerian scam. He was communicating with them for a couple months, and was just about to book a flight to Germany to meet up with them when he inadvertently let it slip out what he was doing. He pulled up his email and showed me everything; lots of Official Looking Bullshit Documents and such. I managed to convince him it was a scam, but it took some doing. At one point, he got this befuddled look on his face and asked “But what about the stamps?”. Some of the documents had official “rubber stamps” on them that were obviously created with some graphics program along with the rest of the document. I mean, even if they had gone to the trouble of scanning a printed document with a phony stamp on it, who would fall for that? Granted, this was about ten years ago, but this scam had been making the rounds by then. I can’t imagine what would have happened to him if he had gone. He had been stationed in Germany years before in the military, so he was more comfortable going there than most people would be, which would probably have lulled him into a false sense of security that would’ve made it that much worse. ---
**Author:** ![chappachula](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/d2c977/32.png) [@chappachula](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/chappachula)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2013, 12:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ugh-i-know-a-guy-who-fell-for-an-internet-scam/651575/36 "2013-03-03T12:48:42Z")
> [@Napier](#): > > We know a bunch of guys who fell for an Internet scam. The scam’s name was “umkay”. nah… that wasn’t a scam… She never asked anybody to send her money. Even with all her lying, that thread was interesting, and contained lots of good, valid info appropriate for this site. ---
**Author:** ![Cicero](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cicero/32/3594_2.png) [@Cicero](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cicero)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2013, 1:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ugh-i-know-a-guy-who-fell-for-an-internet-scam/651575/37 "2013-03-03T13:21:18Z")
Only last week I had my browser hijacked. It had been so long since I had heard of this happening, it took me a while to figure out what it was. I couldn’t even use Wiki without being redirected to some site which Trend would block. Not knowing I was being redirected I thought initially that it was Trend misbehaving. Anyway, after working out what was happening, I tried to use the Microsoft Malicious Software Removal tool. This beast wouldn’t allow it to run. It also turned off the System Restore for Windows 7. So there’s still some nasty stuff out there. I was a little disappointed that Trend didn’t block the original bad site. ( I understand this is different to the original post about being gullible). However, there is a scam running here at the moment which is proving pretty lucrative for those involved. Being relatively close to South Africa, we have quite a large population of ex pats and also residents of RSA who have purchased property here but still reside in South Africa. Said property may be rented and the real estate agent will get a direction to sell the property and place proceeds in a bank in Africa. The only problem is that the instructions are not from the owner. A number of pretty high priced properties have been sold and the money transferred out before the owners even become aware. I have no idea how it eventually pans out. I would imagine the real estate agent has some sort of insurance but I don’t know how it is worked out who now actually owns the property- the original owner or some guy who has paid for it. ---
**Author:** ![Napier](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/ce73a5/32.png) [@Napier](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Napier)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2013, 2:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ugh-i-know-a-guy-who-fell-for-an-internet-scam/651575/38 "2013-03-03T14:09:42Z")
> [@chappachula](#): > > nah… that wasn’t a scam… She never asked anybody to send her money. “a fraudulent or deceptive act or operation” - [SCAM Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster](http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/scam) ---
**Author:** ![Fear\_Itself](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fear_itself/32/19637_2.png) [@Fear\_Itself](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fear_Itself)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2013, 2:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ugh-i-know-a-guy-who-fell-for-an-internet-scam/651575/39 "2013-03-03T14:17:27Z")
> [@ralph124c](#): > > …amazing how the US Congress has never gotten around to any laws against Identity Theft. Identity theft is already illegal. ---
**Author:** ![Cicero](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cicero/32/3594_2.png) [@Cicero](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cicero)\ **Post date:** [March 4, 2013, 10:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ugh-i-know-a-guy-who-fell-for-an-internet-scam/651575/40 "2013-03-04T10:12:01Z")
And today [this](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-03-04/woman-believed-victim-of-online-scam-found-dead/4551050) was in the paper. It gets nasty when it looks like murder is involved. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ugh-i-know-a-guy-who-fell-for-an-internet-scam/651575.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ugh-i-know-a-guy-who-fell-for-an-internet-scam/651575.md?page=3)