Hey, readers, let’s have some fun.
I’ve got a 24″ iMac for sale on Craigslist. I just got this inquiry:
Dear seller, My name Micheal Peter the owner of MICHEAL & SONS LTD based in UK. I will like to buy this your item,iMac 24″ Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB Ram, 256MB video, CS3, more for my son who is presently studying in Africa urgently for his birthday and I will like offer $1800 USD for a fast deal and the shipping to Africa via EMS Speed Post. If you accept my offer get back to me with your Full Name, Bank Name, Bank Account number, IBAN, Swift Code e.t.c so that I can transfer the money to you account immediately through Bank of England. I await your urgent response ASAP. Regards
Naming a fake company with one’s own fake first name is a lovely touch. Any (legal) ideas for amusements? If you haven’t seen it yet(!), check out the classic P-P-P-P-Powerbook for inspiration.
Offer to pre-install some smut from your “collection” and keep asking him for more detail as to what he/she likes to watch..
I have always wished that some law-enforcement agency would go after these turkeys by offering a mechanism that would automatically generate fake — but legitimate-looking and traceable — bank accounts, so we could give the scammer a chance to directly hand them the evidence necessary for legal action.
Alas, nobody seems to care enough to make the effort.
That’s a great story if you read all of it
Another one:
Drag out the negotiations and slowly tip your hand that you are not actually selling a Mac, but an $1,800 picture of a Mac..
See how indignant he gets when he figures out you are scamming him…
Moi @4:
Oh snap! I broke the cardinal rule of not reading the complete link before commenting.
My suggestion still applies if you are not into arts and crafts… And he’s got to wonder how you can ship him a computer for the price of a stamp…
I’m glad I don’t have to go to Africa to study for my Birthday, I’ve been able to skate along by taking my Birthdays Pass/Fail.
I think you may get some mileage out of reversing his expectations: “I’m really trying to raise money to make some movies. Since the release of the movie Be Kind, Please Rewind the public has been clamoring for home-made versions of big budget movies like The Matrix, Jurassic Park and Under Siege. I have a distribution deal set up and I just need to get the movies made. I’m willing to pay $5,000 a piece for these movies.
“Would your son and his friends be interested in working on this project? I will pay extremely well, I just need several examples of their work…”
Wow, that P-P-P-P-Powerbook story was great. But the “seller” just disappeared at the end. Does anybody know what ever happened to him?
You could offer to hand deliver the computer to him as you will be in the neighborhood on business, (security company with dealings with L5).
Another twist to #1: If your Nigerian friend happens to reveal some particularly, embarrassing tastes, and you can tease out his general location and anything that can be used to generally ID him. Nobody is stupid enough to get too specific but he won’t see the next step coming:
Find a local ally that that is as disappointed in these guys as we are. Send the ally a couple of hundred posters with translated pull quotes from your correspondence, a staple gun and a couple of rolls of tape.
Now this does have the downside of being rather nasty, and has a 97.25% probability of being flat out illegal..
Bear in mind that there are extradition treaties between the US an Nigeria and they work both ways…
#6 – Awesome. But I’d just go straight for the dead parrot. It can’t be beaten, but it may yet be duplicated.
Similar happened to me this week, for my iPod. Take a look:
“Hello,
How are you doing today? Am interested in buying this your item for my daughter studying in West Africa which i will be paying you with Bank transfer which is easy and safe way to receive payment.You will have to send the item to her address in Nigeria through TPG/TNT POST Registered Mail or Priority Mail ervice which is fast and safe way of sending things to abroad.So i will be paying you R$190 for the item and R$60 for the shipment via TNT/TPG POST Service, So kindly get back to me with you bank details as listed below in other to send the payment to your bank account.
Here are the details i need from you,
Your Name:
Bank Name:
Bank Account:
Bank City:
Item name:
Item Price:
So i will be expecting your reply as soon as you get this message…
Thanks,
Mrs Douglas.”
I already sold it, but still feel like pulling his leg. but I am out of ideas
Reminder: As has been posted elsewhere, be careful if you decide to try to play these folks. Organized crime rarely has a sense of humor, and there is some risk of their making their displeasure felt.
#12: Don’t people involved in organized crime have better things to do than stupid internet scams? I was under the impression that these sorts of people were just random low level criminals.
Of course, I could be totally wrong.
Yeah, don’t forget that MyNameIsJeff was never heard from again after the P-P-P-Powerbook was received in London (unless the whole thing was really just made up by John Hargrave as a prank)
In the post the scammer (AKA the mouse) after being burned for $550 did launch a DOS attack and sent virus laden attachments back to his umm “mark” (AKA as the cat).
If you slip up he could hijack your identity or hire a Phracker to send a swat team to your house.
But the odds of someone like Silvio Dante taking you for a walk in the woods would be slim.
#13: Internet scamming can be big business, to the point where it really was reported to be a significant portion of the Nigerian economy. Some of these folks are running what amounts to good-sized call centers churning out messages to suckers and handling the occasional response.
Advice from sites that have carried logs of attempts to derive entertainment from these folks — or to scam them back — is that if you’re going to pursue it, you should do so via a completely synthetic identity. I tend to agree.
That’s a bit harder to do when it seems to be a response to a specific listing. It’s much easier when the note was a completely random broadcast, since odds are that those went out identically to many people and they won’t notice if the response comes from a “disposable” identity.
The Internet desperately needs an authenticable/non-repudiable mail protocol. Nothing less is going to stop this sort of nonsense.
I’m pretty sure he’s still alive, a quick google search for MyNameIsJeff gives MySpace.com – MyNameIsJeff – 25 – Male – SEATTLE, Washington and the photos and jocular personality match.
I have received the (nearly) identical email when I was trying to sell a bike. They wanted me to ship my bike to a different continent (!!) and they would pay me $1K for a $100 listing.
nelson sakaguchi, bank director (brazil)
louis gottschalk, reagan psychologist
’nuff said
http://www.419eater.com
It’s all they deserve.
My current job is rather slow, so before Christmas a colleague decided to bait a Euro Lottery spammer and kept it going for several weeks of increasingly surreal exchanges which descended into the conditions for the provision of a giant cheque for promotional purposes in the local newspaper. The spammers are often being conned themselves, getting sold get rich schemes by other conmen who assure them that we anglos are stupid and that big winnings are assured.
As holder of one of the most common names in the world myself (Michael) it was refreshing to see a new acceptable spelling of our name:
“MICHEAL”
I’ll call his version the “african birthday exception.”
Milar (#21): I just Googled “MICHEAL” and skipped the very helpful “did you mean “MICHAEL” option. Most of them were obvious typos but the first page includes: Micheal “Sugar” Ray Richardson, Micheal Michniewicz, and Michael Powell. These seem to be their preferred spelling.
This literally sounds like a variation of Mikhail (as in Gorbachev) or the Arabic and Aramaic Mikha’il. So our African friend may be of Slavic or Middle Eastern origin and a phonetic speller.
#22 Continued:
Woops! This mistake is easy to make!
Please mentally replace “Michael Powell” with “Dr. Micheal Howard-Tripp” in the above post.
Additional scam detector:
If you’re ever offered “payment via Bank of England”, this is a red flag for a scam.
Reason?
The Bank of England isn’t a regular bank — it’s the British equivalent of the Federal Reserve.
(In contrast, both the Bank of Scotland, and the Royal Bank of Scotland — yes, they’re rivals — are ordinary banks, except they’re also two of the four banks that hold right of seigneurage in Scotland and are allowed to issue banknotes. And to complete the set, there is no bank of Wales.)
We have the same distinction here:
The Royal Bank of Canada is a regular bank. The Bank of Canada is similar to the US Federal Reserve.
I like RBC because their banking machines are common in my area, and they never show me a menu page with only one thing to choose from. God I hate that!
@21 Milar:
According to babynamewizard.com (a really well-designed site, btw), about 1 out of 1000 baby boys born in the US in the 50s and 60s were called “Micheal,” making it about the 90th most common boy name. Pretty low, to be sure, but still up there, and actually above what either “Sam” or “Samuel” was in those years.
Man, in Brazil there was once a website that offered “e-shit”.
For a small amount of money, they would ship a bowl full of shit to your “friend” of choice.
They packed in a way the addressee would realize package contents a second too late.
Did Micheal provide his address?