Welcome and happy reading!

Since, like anyone else, I receive tons of scam emails and snail mail letters, I decided to present here some of these. All of these (and many more which I just delete) are scams. This means, what the senders have in mind is to racket one of us. And according to what I've seen, they do succeed quite often.

If you have similar letters in your mailbox, either disregard or play with the person knowing that you can't give him (or her) any information about:

  1. Your bank account,
  2. Your address — or any valid address if that matter,
  3. Your family, and
  4. any other information that you judge private or even intimate.

Ha! I say "Your"... even if you don't like your neighbor at all, don't give his information either. The Internet leaves tracks (hackers in the US are being caught one after another!) and you would certainly be in even bigger trouble.

In the meantime, I hope you will enjoy reading these letters as I do myself once in a while. 8-)I do not always add comments with the letters since I usually don't have time to do so, but there would often be a lot of joke to tell!

Soap Bubbles

 

Latest Scams
  • Kipling's Who's—Who Leading Business Professionals
    Last update: 02/13/2018

    Today I received a letter from Kipling's Who's Who. Have you heard of them before? Me neither. So I looked a bit on the Internet to see what I could find. About 10 people mentioning the fact that they will appear in their directory in 2008 (yes, sometime, in 2008, it will appear...) The funny part in this one is that there is no one saying they where in this directory in 2007. Brand new then? Very possibly... Although I have seen some of the Copyrights saying 2006.

    So... first the scans of the letter...

     
  • Invitation Processing, P.O. Box 6304—Absolutely free invitation completely free of charge
    Last update: 03/29/2014

    Well, another scam? A certainly quite strange letter...

    Below is a copy of my 6 full pages letter that says nothing and means nothing and thus I thought it would be fun to publish it...

       "Alexis, please forgive us, but we have just taken a closer look at
our profile. It turns out you're more special than any of us imagined!
Did you know that you possess some very rare, hidden traits?  In fact, there
is a famous person (someone you would instantly recognize, he's on TV every
night) who possesse these same special, incredibly rare traits. &elipsis;It ...
     
  • Equity Services—Administration Another tweny bucks in the trash
    Last update: 03/30/2014

    Another letter brought to you by unscroupulus people... This one arrived in my mail box. The standard one. You know... the one next to the house. It's also called SnailMail. I won't put too much comments, there is another such letter I received which includes quite many comments (See LVAAP).

     
  • Downloadable Software—OEM Software at incredibly low prices
    Last update: 07/29/2023

    This is the other OEM Software website. That one too looks pretty darn good. Notice that I removed all the links in that copy. Consider this as a cached version of their page.

    Note that there are many sites referencing these people. They usually are in China and Russia, but I'm sure some people from all over the world have come through this one.

     
  • Chase Online—$20 Reward Survey
    Last update: 03/29/2014

    This is a phishing alright! Asking for your info in a subtle way and especially telling you that you will make US $20!

    The link was going to http://sege02.ipicyt.edu.mx/chaseonline.chase.com/update.htm

    Notice the "Chase DEMO" in the blue title bar of the HTML page. The hacker(s) used the demo version of the site to show a page which they think would look like a real version of the site (what a customer would possibly see when really connected.)

    Notice the LOG OFF button. It's the default, so if you click on it, a javascript creates a popup and tells you that it won't ...

     
  • Chase Online—$50 Reward Survey on your credit card
    Last update: 03/29/2014

    Not too sure why people would believe this one... the page looks nothing like a real Chase NA page... it is missing all the menus, copyright, warning about the FDIC insurance, everything. And also, the URL started with an IP address.

    	http://219.84.114.18/icons/ch/onlinesurvey.chase.com/survey.html

    Frankly, if some people get caught with these, I'm just balantly amazed.

    And just in case, I marked the place to enter the card # and PIN as read-only. Notice that some banks ask for your PIN to let you in your account. That's not additional security, to my point of view. To the ...

     
  • Cartasi—Misura di sicurezza
    Last update: 03/29/2014

    Here the real link was: <a href="http://titolari-cartasi-assistenza.com/portal/service.pt/">

    Return-Path:		<assistenza@titolari.cartasi.it>
X-Original-To:		alexis@halk.m2osw.com
Delivered-To:		alexis@halk.m2osw.com
Received:		from wm.bcltele.com (unixweb.bcltele.com [195.144.226.42])
			by halk.m2osw.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id B96F8AEF81
			for <alexis@halk.m2osw.com>; Tue, 29 Jul 2008 07:02:34 -0700 (PDT)
X-AntiVirus:		Checked by BCL anti-virus systems (http://www.bcltele.com)
X-Complaints-To:	abuse@bcltele.com
Received:		from [92.48.116.40] (account ...
     
  • multishipment.com—Notice of unclaimed transfers
    Last update: 02/13/2018

    This email (see very far below) was sent to me by someone in Australia. And here we go again!

     This time, I got an interesting surprise. The email had links to a website named multishipment.com. So I went ahead and checked out the name of the registrant: Dharti Desai. I have the picture on the right here. I have seen her name before, linked to the same companies. The multishipment.com whois also mentions Compass Direct Marketing. That company has had problems with customers as you can read on RipOffReport.com.

    First, the whois of multishipment.com at this time (Mar 30, 2008):

     
  • Paypal Security with Equifax — Click here to cancel your new email address
    Last update: 03/29/2014

    This is changing... looks like more and more like good marketing! Well nearly. For sure, it becomes more and more plausible these email, don't they? I show the link below in regular text. Obviously nothing to do with Equifax.

    Okay... well... the formatting of this email was really bad. I suppose they used MS-Word to generate the HTML. No other tool can do such a bad job, is there?!

    Received: from 82805-web.namestage.com
        by substitute with [XMail 1.22 ESMTP Server]
        id <S16093> for <alexis@m2osw.com> from <service@paypal.com>;
        Tue, 13 Feb ...
     
  • eBay security issue — eBay Trust and Safety Department
    Last update: 07/06/2017

    The following is an email I received the 10 of Marsh 2005. As you can see it includes an address in .nl which has nothing to do with ebay. And I won't mention that I'm not a member so it couldn't really affect me, could it?!

    Since the person was connected at the time I checked the email, I got a trace route:

    traceroute to 209.174.122.21 (209.174.122.21), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
     1  cayman (192.168.1.254)  0.468 ms  0.391 ms  0.369 ms
     2  adsl-64-166-38-37.dsl.scrm01.pacbell.net (64.166.38.37)  8.089 ms  7.153 ms  ...