Skip to content

Scam warnings & me having fun with scammers

Every day I am the lucky winner at an online lottery, I am eligible for a donation from a recent winner of EuroMillions, I am eligible for an inheritance, or asked to help transferring several million dollars to another country, who belongs to a recently deceased businessman, promising me a compensation of 30-50% of the total sum of money.

I get over 100 such emails per month, I occasionally answer to 1% of them with a FUNNY reply, quick, informal, fake personal info, deliberately bad grammar, being curious what they answer and to waste scammers’ time.

I posted here the funniest scammers I scambaited.

SCAM emails: I won $500.000

Every day I am the lucky winner at an online lottery, I am eligible for a donation from a recent winner of EuroMillions, I am eligible for an inheritance, or asked to help transferring several million dollars to another country, who belongs to a recently deceased businessman, promising me a compensation of 30-50% of the total sum of money.

SCAM alert for website owners

This email is from China Intellectual Property Office, which mainly deal with International Trademark and Domain Name etc. Here we have something to confirm with you. Today, we received a formal application. A company named “FongKo Investment Co.,Ltd” was applying to register ” teoalida ” as its international trademark and some domain names(.asia/.cn/.com.cn/.hk/.com.hk/.tw)

Property investment SCAM

This was “property purchase” type of scam, so probably looking for real estate websites, found mine, which have articles about multiple countries, but don’t know how he landed in North Korea article, and assumed that I am living in North Korea. A very IDIOT scammer, North Korea is the only country in the world where nobody can purchase properties (communist government own all real estate) and there is no internet access, so being online should have been obvious that I am living elsewhere.

SCAM alert for real estate agents

I received an email, slightly off my business field. By starting with “Hello Mr. Steven Mak”, I though that he may have sent emails to another person previously then he copy-paste forgetting to change name. Scammers never address by names. Scammers send mass mails with empty TO: field, his email had at TO: my Yahoo email address. So I replied. His 3rd email looked suspicious as he used word TRUST excessively, and bad english, and at 4th email he said that will give me 20% of his 22 million dollars, I realized that is a SCAM. Most likely he was going to ask me to open a bank account in his country to wire the promised funds, but ask several fees in advance.

SCAM alert for web designers

He don’t even ask for my portfolio to make sure I am able to do his job, instead he say directly that will ship to me his credit card to charge for the sum of $6,450 and request me to pay $3,000 to a person who provide content, probably afterwards he was going to block the card or chargeback the $6,450, scamming me with $3,000.

Having fun with scammers: another Ayesha Gaddafi (2013)

I tried to have fun with one of the dozens scammers who email me each month, to see how the scam is done and how far away the scammer can go, to post it there, amuse friends and eventually send to fraud-prevention organizations. We exchanged 44 emails over 12 days.

You can see how smart is the scam criminal, well-made story trying to get my confidence, although she made few mistakes that gave her away, but also see how smart I am, to act like an naive victim and pretend that I am confident in her and I am going to send her money!

Having fun with scammers: Aisha Gaddafi (2012)

The Criminal is pretending to be Aisha Gaddafi (daughter of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi killed on 20 October 2011), wants to relocate to “my country” without knowing where I am from, and will ship to me a box containing 16.5 million USD, allowing me to keep 30% of total sum for helping her escaping from Ghana. She is telling me to contact another person from criminal group pretending to be a lawyer, which I expected to ask me to pay few hundred dollars as shipping cost / insurance fee or whatever… but the fraud attempt had an unexpected turnout!

Robot “girls” doing webcam shows on Yahoo Messenger

I got contacted by several such robots, most use this message when adding me: “Please add me to your Yahoo messenger contact list so we can chat. Thanks.”, all pretends to be girls from Florida, saying that are ready to undress and strip in front of webcam, telling me to join some adult erotic websites where credit card is required, supposedly only to verify age, but most likely they want to steal my bank details and MONEY.