Sunday, February 25, 2007

Nigerian Letter Scams

After reading this great exchange of a Nigerian letter scammer and his wouldbe victim
( http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthread.php?t=105805 ), I was reminded of my own brushes with these weaels:
First outting: I was smarting from being scammed by Lewis and Oswald, I was contacted by a Nigerian Letter scammer who wanted me to participate. I responded with zeal. They asked for my fax number so that they could fax me the documents I needed to fill out. I gave them Lewis and Oswald's voice line. The scammers emailed me that they couldn't get the fax through. I told them that the business was very busy and the best time to try faxes on this line was after midnight in our timezone. I told them that this was important and asked them to try as many times as it took to get this information to me.
Second outting: We used phpBB as a forum tool. It was also a spam magnet from weiners using our site to build their page rank. We were hit with hundreds of faked sign-ups and posts. I noticed a pattern to their postings and I recoded the script to look for this pattern. When it was encountered, the scammer was added to our block list and not our users list. But they got a thank you message as though all was well. It was a Chinese finger trap (ironic since most of the sign-ups came from China): the more they tried, the more info we gathered about them and better we were able to tune our blocking script and block their alternative addresses. The pay-off came when one of the scammers emailed us all verclamt (sic): they knew they signed up and were pissed that they couldn't get in. Nothing better than seeing some weasel all sad and checkmated.

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