I BUY YOUR BIKE

Where they come from they are the authorities.

JHH

wrote:
snip
If it sounds to good to be true, it isn't.


It isn't? I always thought it was too good to be true if it sounded that
way.

John


Matt

"MattB" wrote: It isn't? I always thought it was too good to be true if it
sounded that way.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I could care less. Or maybe I couldn't care less. Whatever.

Question?

I get emails in which people ask me to respond if I ship to nigeria and
if I take credit cards. weird since I don't sell anything, but what are
these people fishing for?

Quoting :
I get emails in which people ask me to respond if I ship to nigeria and
if I take credit cards. weird since I don't sell anything, but what are
these people fishing for?

They get the goods and they pay with someone else's credit card.
--
David Damerell Distortion Field!
Today is Second Teleute, July.

Quoting GWood :
I have set up dozens of email filter rules via Outlook, so most get routed
to the bit bucket on the way in. Interesting that the spammers will go to
the effort of trying to mask the text in their mails (i.e. substituting "1"
for "i" and similar pattern matching) to try to fool the email filters. As
if someone (or company) who deliberately filters the original trash will
actually change their minds when the doctored email gets through the filter?

Well, yes. Imagine a company that filters the junk; get through the
filters, you can spam the suckers amongst the employees. Lots of people
don't know about all the filtering on their mail, and some of them are
suckers.
--
David Damerell Distortion Field!
Today is Second Teleute, July.

On 27 Jul 2005 05:48:12 -0700, wrote:

Question?

I get emails in which people ask me to respond if I ship to nigeria and
if I take credit cards. weird since I don't sell anything, but what are
these people fishing for?

A sucker.

There are two main variants to their game.

In one, they place a large order for merchandise of an easily-sold
nature and "pay" for it with charges to credit cards which *appear* to
go through when initially submitted. The merchandise is delivered
either to an accomplice who shows up to collect it, or to a freight
forwarder who loads it into an air freight container and sends it on
before the charges can be reversed. Then, in a few days, the charges
are reversed, and by the banking laws in Nigeria, those reversals are
not subject to challenge.

In the second variant, the buyer insists that the seller accept
payment for the freight charges and pay the freight outbound.
Sometimes they even ask for payment to a "forwarding agent" who is
actually their own accomplice. Needless to say, the burned victim in
that case not only gets ripped off for the merchandise, but gets to
pay to have it delivered to the thief.

Once in a while, they will find a business run by someone gullible
enough to think it's OK to take an "international debit card"
transaction with a large cash-back component; the end result is the
same.

The fraudsters seem to be learning that the word is out about shipping
stuff to Nigeria. The last few such scam contacts have come from
email addresses in Israel, the Netherlands and the UAE, with
unspecified destinations...but they still flunked the basic test suite
of "Is it reasonable that my merchandise should be in demand there, is
there sufficient safety for me in acceptance of the payment method,
and can I afford the loss if this is a scam?" It only has to flunk
one of the three tests to keep me from responding.


--
Typoes are a feature, not a bug.
Some gardening required to reply via email.
Words processed in a facility that contains nuts.

On 27 Jul 2005 14:31:59 +0100 (BST), David Damerell
wrote:

Quoting GWood :
I have set up dozens of email filter rules via Outlook, so most get routed
to the bit bucket on the way in. Interesting that the spammers will go to
the effort of trying to mask the text in their mails (i.e. substituting "1"
for "i" and similar pattern matching) to try to fool the email filters. As
if someone (or company) who deliberately filters the original trash will
actually change their minds when the doctored email gets through the filter?

Well, yes. Imagine a company that filters the junk; get through the
filters, you can spam the suckers amongst the employees. Lots of people
don't know about all the filtering on their mail, and some of them are
suckers.

A year or two back some gal, an accountant at a California law firm embezzled
something like 200 LARGE when she got bit by a Nigerian scam. She was going to
pay it all back as soon as she got the "AMOUNT OF FOURTY-SEVEN MILLION DOLLARS
LEFT IN THE ACCOUNT OF THE SOUTHERN NIGERIAN PETROLEUM TRUST TRANSFERRED TO YOUR
BANK FOR CLEARANCE."

Gotta believe the scammers repeat that story among themselves and pray for a
score like that.


Ron

"David Damerell" wrote in message
...
Quoting :
I get emails in which people ask me to respond if I ship to nigeria and
if I take credit cards. weird since I don't sell anything, but what are
these people fishing for?

They get the goods and they pay with someone else's credit card.
--
David Damerell Distortion Field!
Today is Second Teleute, July.

There was a big scam going around a few months ago. I had a frame for sale
on the craigslist and was contacted by a person many times by email that
they would send me a check for $5,000, and I was to extract from that, the
cost of the frame and send the remaining balance back by Western Union. I
knew it was a scam and tried to get the person to send the check so I could
get a good look at it and hopes to turn this person in, but the check never
came.
-tom

On Tue, 26 Jul 2005 16:55:38 -0600, MattB
wrote:

It must work on someone or they would just dry up for lack of business.
I'm amazed when I think about that. Even if it was something I really
wanted, I would not respond to spam (in a serious way) for anything. I'd
try to buy from a non-spamming competitor.

The economies of scale for spamming are unlike any other advertising
method. Because the sender bears virtually none of the cost of
delivery (and the recipient bears *more* in virtually all cases),
spammers can afford to send literally millions of spam emails per day.
Some send millions *per hour*. If they get a response rate in the
range of one thousandth of a percent, they may still make money.

Of course, there are multiple reasons not to buy from a spammer.
First and most important, spamming is itself theft; it makes
unauthorized use of computer time and resources, without
authorization, to deliver the spam. Buying from a spammer is
supporting that theft. Second, spammers are not a reputable source
for *anything*; there are ample documented instances of spammers
taking their victims money and delivering *nothing*, and even more
documented cases of their delivering a worthless or even dangerous
product. And then there are the spammers who sell pirated software,
the ones who are running identity theft scams, etc.

"Never buy anything from a spammer" is the only safe policy.

I'll be one happy guy when the big hand starts to slap these guys. What a
waste of oxygen.


I'm not holding my breath. Most of these come from places where the
authorities have much bigger fish to fry.

It's not that the authorities have bigger fish to fry in many cases,
it's that the authorities don't give a rat's ass about the spamming
because it's only ripping off people in *other countries*. Take the
Chinese hosting services for the blue-pill spammers, for example. The
Chinese are *producing* the bogus pills that the spammers are selling
to gullible Americans, and what the spammers are doing is *legal*
under Chinese law because all of the violations occur outside China.
They have no reason to interfere, and a strong economic disincentive
to do anything but *protect* the spammers.

I could go on and on about why the problem is as bad as it is...but
that's way OT for this forum.
--
Typoes are a feature, not a bug.
Some gardening required to reply via email.
Words processed in a facility that contains nuts.