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.
Paid-To-Click sites, also known as BUX, are one of easiest (but stupidest) way of making money using internet. With just few minutes per day you can earn… FEW CENTS! This was popular along teenagers looking to make money online.
This person started chatting in a weird way, without saying what service he needs from me, plus his location in an African country gave me impression of a SCAMMER. I gave him link to a chatlog with a previous scammer and despite of this he keep trying to SCAM me mentioning that wants to transfer me 17 million euro…
We all know the scammers sending mass mails announcing us that we receive a large sum of money but ask us to pay several fees in advance. But some day, a scammer choose to contact me via my website chat rather than sending emails. I tried to play the role of a naive guy to see how he is trying to SCAM me, but this scammer was really idiot, he did not even know how to trick me!
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)
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.
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.
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.
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!
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!
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.