With the flood of “Hello my dear” and “YOU ARE WINNER” emails in my inbox every morning, I’m actually beginning to tire of the never-ending variety presented by spam. But it’s mail like this that renews my faith in the bots and non-native speakers variating these strange messages.
The best part is trying to figure out how the scam works; it’s not your usual phishing or Spanish Prisoner scheme. Anyone have any ideas or fun variants of this sort of thing?
I get these too. The ones I get are even vaguer: they just say that they’re interested in buying “my products” (and then ask me to send them the URL of my website, presumably so that they can find out what products they are supposed to be buying).
One possibility is that this is a “check overpayment scam”. When “David James” pays you for your chainsaws, he will overpay you by a few hundred dollars. He will then ask that you transfer the balance to some other location, probably by Western Union. If he pays by check, his check will later turn out to be a forgery; if he pays by credit card, the credit card will turn out to be someone else’s. The bank will then debit your account, and you’ll have lost all the money you sent him (and your chainsaws).
Sounds pretty real – he mentions credit card information, though – I wonder if it’s just as simple as it looks? Get some credulous people who think this guy will send them money to give up their CC details.
Maybe if they ask you for your address put the one of an airport or something like a store and if they ask for anything else make up lies see what that gets you at maybe it will even give you what they are saying.
I think I must have some sort of disorder (or maybe it’s a side effect of my imaginary medication?) whereby I send out spam in my sleep; fully half of my g-mail spam is from “me.”
I don’t really care about spam, I just want to know what size chainsaws you have, and if you wouldn’t mind giving me a discount.
what the… it’s very ridiculous
This is no scam. If you dont sell him te chainsaws, we will. This is no time to turn down sales. Snobs!!
Of course what he wants to buy is irrelevant, but somebody out there will think, “I don’t sell chainsaws, but I know where I can get them, so maybe I can make a profit here.” It’s the kind of thing you might imagine this guy – wherever he is – having trouble getting hold of, so it’s sort-of plausible.
Now then he’s in touch with a victim! “I don’t sell these, but I can get them… blah blah bah.” That’s stage one.
What I think happens next is this guy offers to do a direct transfer into your bank so you avoid paying the credit card fee, or maybe the total value is too much for his card. Whatever the excuse, he wants your bank details.
Now he has your name and address, and your bank account name, number and sort code. On to stage three, empty it.
ass munch
Like (nearly) everyone, I’ ve also had a big problem with “spam-mails” for quite a long time. The main problem was that many of such mails were “delivered” to the inbox of my business mail account. Furthermore, i wasn’t able to identify (possible) phishing mails. It was just annoying that 8 of 10 mails were trash [...]
well, i solved the problem by implementing a virtual appliance from underground8, which is a serious supplier for email security products.
Here is the link, where you can download a test-version of this virtual appliance (14 days for FREE): https://my.underground8.com/?set_Language=2
Best regards
Paul