I just got my first 401 419 scam email from China. I can sort of understand how these emails might have worked three years ago, but at this point, everyone gets at least a few a day. This should breed a certain cynicism in the recipients. So who are all these people who have just gotten their first email accounts, and also, not watched any television or read any newspapers for the past five years?
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Question of the day
29 Apr 2008 08:30 am
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Comments (20)
The targets might be within China. In India, the equivalent of the Nigerian letter was the Australian letter, and it is amazing how many, otherwise intelligent, people fell victim there.
How far can you go in responding to a 401 e-mail without giving away necessary information? (it's been a while since I've gotten one of these e-mails, so I can't remember). I've always wondered if there was any amusement to be gained from playing along for a step or two.
Agreed, it's all the moronic victim's fault for being so stupid.
I believe the scam are generally referred to as "419" scams, as that's the relevant section of the penal code in Nigeria (where a lot of these scams orginate).
Why not assume that there's a new stream of gullible, wannabe scammers coming on line continuously who don't yet know that nobody is evern going to respond? Perhaps they are, themselves, being scammed by whoever is supplying the email address lists.
401k's aren't a scam, especially if your employer matches! I'd recommend you take advantage of it.
"So who are all these people who have just gotten their first email accounts, and also, not watched any television or read any newspapers for the past five years?"
Australians
c'mon, this is a testament to how the horsepower of the computer can be harnessed for fun and profit! If there are a few gullibulls out there, the magic of computing will find them for you. Every day a few more come online, babes in the woods, and all you have to do is sniff out their innocence, and you too can turn an old fashioned profit... The Internet. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious...
The Law Society had to put out a warning to solicitors about 491 scams arriving in their fax machines. Greed overwhelms amongst all kinds of people, especially those who like to think of themselves as clever.
Cost to send out 10,000,000 e-mails: about $1K for a server and an unlimited volume e-mail account. Take from a single sucker: >$1K. So it only needs to work once in 10,000,000 times.
My brother nearly fell for one of those a few months after receiving a severe brain injury. He says his critical thinking skills kicked in just before hitting Reply.
It's a mental skill to read an email (or indeed anything) and bring to it the relevant knowledge that, say, "This sounds just like that scam that was on TV last night". Things can go wrong with that skill, just as much as things can go wrong with your vision. And things can go wrong because you were born that way, or because of application of alcohol, or because you went from 40km/hr to 0km/hr in less than one second and the bicycle helmet couldn't cope with the problem all by itself and deputised some of the work to your brain.
How far can you TAKE such a correspondence?
I believe the one I included below is a classic in the field. I see no reason in competing with the master.
http://www.quatloos.com/brad-c/musa.htm
These emails are scams?
things can go wrong...because of application of alcohol...
A good friend of mine once spend half a day calling all his financial companies, red-faced, because he had responded to some scam or another while drunk. I wonder how many people let embarrassment prevent them from taking action until the money disappears?
I used to post all the ones I received up on a blog so that if anyone got one and searched Google they'd find out it was a scam.
The people who wrote to me as a result tended to be from the Middle East and Indonesia (??). People just coming online for the first time....
My wife works at a grocery store, and still sees the gullible coming in and wiring money to Canada because they've won a prize. They've called the police more than once, but people want to believe.
I'm sure the similarity to belief in a first term Senator with no legislative accomplishments is coincidental.
Come to think of it, I haven't seem one of these for a while. My ISP's spam filters must be working pretty well.
Work-safe, AFAIK. It basically details how one 419 recipient counterscammed the Nigerian sender by posing as an art dealer. Got a couple impressive wood carvings out of the deal, too.
The interesting point, however, is that he was able to learn that the scammer was making better than about US$50k/year IIRC. As someone else already noted, the barriers to entry are low; you don't need more than a few of these emails to succeed in order to have a profitable con game.
There was a piece in the New Yorker some time ago about a guy who fell for a 419 scam. He's going to jail, he's lost his practice, he's lost everything... and he still believes that, at least at some point, he was talking to the real Miriam Abacha or whoever the scammer was pretending to be.
But it's easy to explain how people fall for it:
* They don't get much spam (because of effective-but-imperfect spam filters and because their address isn't listed anywhere online and therefore have not been harvested by spiders);
* They are greedy -- if it sounds too good to be true, it's right up their alley;
* They think they can outsmart the scammer, who claims to be ready to give you a lot of money if only you'll return some of it afterwards;
* They cannot admit their mistake. Once they bite that fishhook, they can't let go. Fixed costs and all that.
My wife works at a grocery store, and still sees the gullible coming in and wiring money to Canada because they've won a prize.
Just last week we stopped an old lady from sending money to England. I have no sympathy for you if you're a young or middle-aged person who falls for this, but you can see why some of the elderly who have no idea about the Internets would.
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Megan, don't be silly, that's from China which is a completely different place than Africa. Why would they have the same scams?
Posted by Aaron | April 29, 2008 8:47 AM