Interesting People mailing list archives
The Minds of Net Scammers
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Mon, 6 Jul 2009 16:49:11 -0400
Begin forwarded message: From: dewayne () warpspeed com (Dewayne Hendricks) Date: July 6, 2009 1:43:18 PM EDT To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <xyzzy () warpspeed com> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] The Minds of Net Scammers [Note: This item comes from friend Dave Hughes. DLH] From: "Dave Hughes" <dave () oldcolo com> Date: July 6, 2009 10:30:15 AM PDT To: "'Dewayne Hendricks'" <dewayne () warpspeed com> Cc: "'Dave Hughes'" <dave () oldcolo com> Subject: The Minds of Net Scammers Hey Dewayne. Maybe your maillisters could answer my question.I have, over the last 7+ years at LEAST gotten one or more offers EVERY DAY to get millions of dollars from email scammers in my email. Which all of you undoubtedly get too. All of which I or my junk mail discards, the minute I see the routine and EVER repeated opening like "You don't know me but..." Or "I am the Vice President of a London Bank who controls an account has been dormant) " or "I am a widow of a wealthy industrialist in Nigeria but I have
"Esophageal cancer" ..." Now my question, has anyone EVER heard of ONE of these solicited offerswhich routinely promise millions ever suckered anyone to bite and shell out ‘earnest’ money to get that scam bonanza? (Which is the only goal that I can
see being pursued by the scammers with these messages)What amazes me is the absolute lack of ORIGINALITY of these messages. As if
someone has found a Pavlovian 'winning appeal' message that elicits aresponse and somebody has been milked of some real money and word of that
success has really gotten around. While over the past 5 years - the name dropping and self descriptions and never rounding the improbable amount (‘$15 million’ but like another this morning that states "One of ouraccounts with holding balance of £25,549,000.00 (Twenty Five Million five Hundred and fourty nine Thousand British Pounds sterling) have gotten ever
more 'authoritative' sounding – with job titles and references toinstitutions - but ALWAYS the pitch is instantly recognizable by the very
first lines of the email as an improbable fraud. And of course they are almost always from an exotic place - Singapore, Ghana, Nigeria. So are there that many stupid scammers around who fruitlessly repeat adnauseum the same pitch? Or are they such good students of 'mass marketing’
statistical probabilities that they know one in a hundred thousand emailrecipients will buy into anything? Ad salesmen out of work or gone bad? Is it that the old saying ‘ A sucker is born every minute’ been adapted to the Internet as ‘A sucker with a credit card and an email address is born
every 250,000 emails?’Now I know my email address has been around a long time since (in the late 1980’s) - I got a (rare) Class C address space and tied up oldcolo.com, but
that can’t be the only reason. Where is the graduate student who has done his Phd thesis on the braincontent of Internet scammers? And figured out what they think they know and
why? And how often people fall for it? Dave HughesRSS Feed: <http://www.warpspeed.com/wordpress> ------------------------------------------- Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
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- The Minds of Net Scammers David Farber (Jul 06)