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
  • Last update: 04/30/2018

    At least this one tells you up front how much you're going to have to pay on him... $310 are the only fees you need to pay to get your funds transferred to you. All good!

    Now, I put this one here, I have a few others like this already, but this one I like because the guy clearly states that such emails are from fakes. I'm afraid, though, that those people aren't fake at all. It's more like they are very real. The proposed payments are definitely fake, though.

    Also he does not explain how those $5 million he mentioned would still be "awarded" to him and that part ...

     
  • Last update: 02/22/2018

    Facebook, hey?

    This email was made to look like a Facebook notification, albeit, rather broken HTML if you ask me...

    That being said, it's just spam and not really a super bad hacker, even if sending you to a so called Internet Marketer website.

    Someone who found a cheap way of advertising their website and instead of being truthful they give you an email that has nothing to do with what the email is for/about. It's just sad to see so many doing such a thing.

    Then a little later I received a second email. This time it was from LinkedIn. The mistake from the spammer in this case? He ...

     
  • Last update: 08/26/2018

    Today I received a text, looked at it, and it was a lead from REDFIN. I'm a Realtor with Diverse Realty in Sacramento.

    The message is asking me to pay $10 for the lead with a variety of systems such as Paypal and credit cards. That way I could see the full name, phone number, and address of said lead.

    Some people are reporting receiving Realtor.com scams which look exactly the same. So beware!

     
  • Last update: 01/23/2018

    First one I see about cryptocurrency.

    This one has a funny email which mispells the word "coin"

    alerts@conbase.com

    What I find funny is that they removed the letter 'i' which transforms the word "coin" into "con"... artist, I guess. Ha! Ha! I find that funny.

    The URL uses was a funny super long thing. Not too sure what it does I did not try it. Something about you confirming your account. Maybe a form asking you for your credential allowing them to then access your cryptocurrency account.

    ...

     
  • Last update: 12/23/2017

    So... particularly important: this is LEGITIMATE AND LEGAL. I'm glad this Mr Peter told me that because I had a doubt for a minute. cheeky

    Now... this is a new one. Someone managing a fund with an excess of 1.2%. Hmmm... so they knew how much that fund had to produce and stole the cream at the top?! Never heard of that in the financial community. Maybe I'm a bit misinformed.

    Please be careful out there!


    Return-Path: <SRS0+Wy6b=DU=gmail.com=aturnerr1976@m2osw.com>
    X-Original-To: alexis@m2osw.com
    Delivered-To: alexis@m2osw.com
    X-Greylist: delayed 3225 seconds by postgrey-1.35 ...
     
  • Last update: 12/19/2017

    Fun one.

    So this guy installed some malware on my computer and he has tons of pics and videos that he had a really hard time to gather, as I could imagine (yes, read the email below!) and if I don't pay him $350 he's going to email that data to all my contacts.

    I wonder how many people receiving such threat will fall for it. Especially because sending screenshots is not going to make it more believable that it is indeed my computer that he took the footage from. There are literally billions of people with similar computers?!

    Not only that, many people receive emails with stuff like ...

     
  • Last update: 11/26/2017

    Okay, you're going to tell me, this is just yet another Bank Account phishing scam... you're right.

    Only this one is laughable because... of this line:

    TEL XXX-XXX-XXX

    How often would a bank hide its phone number?! Don't want me to ever call you??? Ha! Ha! Stupid scammer.

    Frankly, just check online for a number and stick it in there. People are not going to use that number anyway (unless they're real idiots) because they should directly call using the number on the back of their ATM or Credit Card. Not from some email phone number that could have been tempered with.


     ...
     
  • Last update: 11/22/2017

    This one is really good, the email is a really nice looking invoice so you probably would think, what the heck?!

    One big mistake, though: the scammer put 342 in the subject and 51 in the email. Obviously, they need to get their system screwed right. wink

     

    That being said, the point here is to get the people to open the .zip attached to the file because, well... maybe it will answer the question of: What the heck is that invoice? Right? Of course, that's a virus. Well... I did not try to open it, it's a word document, it may have a macro or a link back to a website where you'll ...

     
  • Last update: 11/24/2017

    A couple of days ago, I received a contact from Realtor.com. What they do is make sure that a cell phone and an email address get registered. The cell phone is simple, they just send a code via a message and if you can enter the code in your website, the phone is considered validated. The email address, same thing, they send you a link you have to follow and that will make it think you own that email account.

    So in itself, that won't really prevent a scammer from using the system.

    This is what the message said:

       "I'm interested in 2104 University Park Dr, ...

     
  • Last update: 10/04/2017

    So... this one I put here because the subject is like a book and I thought that was very funny. I'd bet many mail clients cannot even display that subject!

    The rest of the email was formatted properly, although obviously the content... the English... you know...


    X-Mozilla-Status: 0001
    X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000
    X-Mozilla-Keys:                                                                                 
    Return-Path: <SRS0+W6t3=BE=alice.it=luca.salvetti@m2osw.com>
    X-Original-To: alexis@m2osw.com
    Delivered-To: alexis@m2osw.com
    Received: from smtp301.alice.it ...