You may have already heard from Umaoru, his email spam arrived in my mailbox at the stroke of midnight. As strange as it may seem (ok, geeky as it may seem, I have been collecting scams like this for three or four years. I have seen them get more and more creative, even convincing. Mr. (I am guessing gender) Umaoru has picked up on recent news, blended it with a Nigerian 419 Bank scam flavor, and spiced it up with a flattering recommendation of me from someone in our embassy (yea, right). I have terms for Mr. Sadiq's proposal and they are non-negotiable:
Dear (good-buddy) Sadiq:
1. You must charge-up your magic carpet and arrive in Nashville by opening of business today.
2. You must bring a token of your sincere desire to do business with me, in cash, small bills, unmarked, say $50,000...that, would open our lines of communication...and cover expenses (cough, cough)
3. You must agree to a video tape review of items one and two (above) by two of my old friends: one FBI agent and one US Custom's agent, before we do business...it's for your safety and mine *wink*
Sincerely,
Paul "Make-my-day" DeFraudless
I am guessing that items one through three would be deal busters...it's just a guess.
In our last ITS meeting, our network people reported on a problem that they were having with the university's spam filtering system...it sounded a lot like the poor thing just needs a vacation. Every day at Belmont, roughly 35,000 pieces of spam email are stopped at the mail server and never delivered to their unsuspecting targets. They run the complete gamut from pharma to mortgage offers to ring-tones to penny stock tips to instant weight loss miracles. They are all spam...harmless for the most part.
The scam-spam, like the Umaoru Sadiq email is much more insidious. Someone, somewhere will probably get entangled in this scheme and suffer financial and/or legal consequences. If it looks like a scam, smells like a scam, and sounds like an its-too-good-to-be-true scam...then guess what? It's a scam.
(end of rant, end of sermon)