OT: Son of a ...

[Arkcon]

I'm currently unemployed, and I have my resume on some job sites with a throw-away email address. Good thing I did it that way, becaue I found this email in my box today:


Hello Arkcon. My name is Robert Hutchins and I work for a company called Deg Invest I found your resume on careerbuilder.com because we are searching for reliable professionals across the United States who are interested in a potentially lucrative partnership with an international firm.

Deg Invest is a leading investition company in Germany and we are currently expanding our operations in the United States. But because of various banking and legal restrictions, we are unable to open commercial bank accounts in every state. As such, Deg Invest is recruiting partners to conduct simple banking transactions on our behalf.



And so on. So there you have it. The typical 419 scam. I guess I shouldn't be suprised, but their brazen letter, and even their matter-of-fact website, just leaves me feeling so http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/mad.gifhttp://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/mad.gifhttp://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/mad.gif. Not at how low and greedy people are, that's a given. But that they would assume anyone would be so stupid as to fall for this.

Dang, this only happened when I posted to careerbuilder.com, it didn't happen with monster.com or others. Good thing I created the throwaway email for it.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Bad writing in only one spot; aside from that, the first paragraph looks plausible.

However, I find it hard to beleive, even forgetting for the moment such scams, that anyone would recruit someone to do any kind of banking by e-mail.

Just yesterday I received a 'petition' claiming to be from MADD. It had a very moving poem and is apparently a common hoax e-mail - I've got MADDs' page on it bookmarked, if anyone is curious.

[Renegade 13]

I'm curious.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

It's really not much of a page: http://www.madd.org/aboutus/0,1056,1219,00.html

edit:
Fixed broken link

[Renegade 13]

Thanks Narf.

[Atrocities]

There ought to be a law!

[Caduceus]

Talking state/national vs. international, AT. That's the problem. Besides the fact that most countries cyber-FBI units are behind the times.

[General Woundwort]

wildcard06 said:
Talking state/national vs. international, AT. That's the problem. Besides the fact that most countries cyber-FBI units are behind the times.



If they haven't been bribed into inaction, that is...

[AgentZero]

Something similar happened to my dad. He got an email off of eBay telling him he needed to update his account page. He clicked the provided link and filled in all his information again, including credit card details. Then, a couple days later he was at the eBay site and checked his account page and noticed that a few small changes he'd made didn't appear. He put two and two together and the first thing he did was ring his bank to have his credit card blocked. The following day, he recieved an email off of Paypal saying that since he'd changed his eBay details they could no longer process payments until he updated his details with them. Of course, being a bit suspicious at that point, he forwarded the email to Paypals customer service, who wrote him back saying that the email had not come from Paypal at all.

Sneaky sneaky sneaky, no?

[Baron Munchausen]

There's always a sucker out there who will believe these scams. I've got THREE copies of the same phishing scam today. (Pretending to be from Wells Fargo, but I don't even have an account with them.) You'd think that a scammer would consider whether this kind of insistence would look a bit suspicious. Why would the 'security' department at a major banking institution be so frantic as to send the same notice three times in one day? This guy must be really desperate or really stupid. But I bet he gets some replies from at least a few harried office workers who aren't thinking about what they are doing.

[jeffel]

The phishing scams are really astounding. They almost all take advantage of a trust that most people have for official looking documents.

My policy when I get an email that requests any data is to go to my personal bookmarked page for the institution in question. I never enter data into any page linked from an email.

I know that you guys already know to be careful, but I try to remind my less computer saavy friends about this. Get the word out so these scumbags don't get anything.

[Atrocities]

I tell ya what, if some Senator or Congressman ever should happen to fall for one of these scams, ohhhh boy....

[General Woundwort]

Like they ever read their own e-mails. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/smirk.gif