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: 10/31/2009

    WARNING: This following email has nothing to do with ITE. This is some scammer who either wants your money or wants to use your bank account to launder money. Note that when you read this email it sounds like that company, ITE, is selling pretty much everything there is.

     
  • Last update: 10/31/2009
    Received:	from snap.turnwatcher.com by substitute with [XMail 1.22 ESMTP Server]
    		id <S8BA2> for <@mail.m2osw.com:alexis@halk.m2osw.com>
    		from <ishatumohamed1@she.com>; Tue, 11 Jul 2006 06:10:01 -0700
    Received:	from she704.com (unknown [80.87.85.131]) by snap.turnwatcher.com (Postfix)
    		with SMTP id 33B1F26AD74 for <alexis@m2osw.com>; Tue, 11 Jul 2006 06:10:42 -0700 (PDT)
    From:		ISHATU MOHAMED <ishatumohamed1@she.com>
    To:		alexis@m2osw.com
    Reply-To:	ishatu_mohamed@she.com
    Subject:	Assalamo Alaikum,From Ishatu Mohamed
    Date:		Tue, 11 Jul 2006 14:10:43 +0100
    
     
  • Last update: 11/23/2014

    Hey! The IRS owes me money! Cool! 8-) Got one about the U.K. tax office too. Well... the truth is that so far I'ven't seen the IRS sending me emails in that regard. So I shall consider this email a scam. And my return was not that number anyway.


    Return-Path:		<refund@irs.gov>
    X-Original-To:		alexis@halk.m2osw.com
    Delivered-To:		alexis@halk.m2osw.com
    Received:		from snap.turnwatcher.com (colo [168.150.251.50])
    			by halk.m2osw.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 57B781BDE2
    			for <alexis@halk.m2osw.com>; Fri, 17 Aug 2007 09:40:05 -0700 (PDT)
    Received:		from ...
     
  • Last update: 02/18/2012

    This is what we could call evolution. The people sending scam and spam are changing their ways all the time. First badly formed text emails. Then properly written text emails. Then HTML emails. Images so text based anti-spam cannot stop them. And not .doc documents attached to your email. Since a lot of people will not receive those (i.e. their email server will refuse external .doc and many other documents especially if it comes from an unknown source), it probably won't affect too many people. Still, it is interesting to see the evolution.

    So... what invoice are they talking about,

     
  • Last update: 11/24/2014

    The following is a sample of what you can receive (first time for me!) from who knows who asking you to go change your password or something like that...

     

    This is a scam, it will actually reproduce the screens from the bank and of course it will expect you to type in your account information. After that, the person can transfer whatever money to wherever...

    This is most certainly why CitiBank blocks access to their login screens from outside of the US. Now that's not a solution since hackers have access to thousands of computers in the U.S. and hackers have much better to go via ...

     
  • Last update: 10/31/2009
    Return-Path:		<insequealai.quentin@btinternet.com>
    X-Original-To:		alexis@halk.m2osw.com
    Delivered-To:		alexis@halk.m2osw.com
    Received:		from mail.m2osw.com (jcolo [69.55.238.181])
    			by halk.m2osw.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8B1F01BDE4
    			for <alexis@halk.m2osw.com>; Thu, 24 Jan 2008 00:26:04 -0800 (PST)
    Received:		from wallaby.tokyonet.com.au (wallaby.tokyonet.com.au [203.77.161.12])
    			(using TLSv1 with cipher DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA (256/256 bits))
    			(No client certificate requested)
    			by mail.m2osw.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8C61567840E0
    			for <alexis@m2osw.com>; T
     
  • Last update: 07/06/2017

    A little while ago, I started to promote my company's new product: Turn Watcher (an Initiative Tracker for Game Masters). With it, I got a huge increase of spam. It was increasing anyway, but that got to the level of close to 100 totally useless emails a day filling over 1Mb of my mailbox in no time!

    So I decided to create a spam filter. It works great and I have about 100 emails block per day. One very important point of my filter: it doesn't check the origins (i.e. the From: parameter) of the emails. This is not only not reliable, it's actually common people with valid emails ...

     
  • Last update: 10/31/2009
    X-Apparently-To:		alexis_wilke@yahoo.com via 206.190.38.201; Thu, 25 Nov 2004 20:37:53 -0800
    Authentication-Results:		mta104.mail.sc5.yahoo.com from=zipmail.com.br; domainkeys=neutral (no sig)
    X-Originating-IP:		[66.35.250.206]
    Return-Path:			<ifeanyiikem111@zipmail.com.br>
    Received:			from 66.35.250.206 (EHLO sc8-sf-mx1.sourceforge.net) (66.35.250.206)
    				by mta104.mail.sc5.yahoo.com with SMTP; Thu, 25 Nov 2004 20:37:52 -0800
    Received:			from smtp.zipmail.com.br ([200.221.11.147] helo=www.zipmail.com.br)
    				by sc8-sf-mx1.sourceforge.net with esmtp (Exim 4.41)
    				id 1CXXri-0006A
     
  • Last update: 10/31/2009

    I put this one here because the first sentence is really funny...

     
  • Last update: 08/13/2017

    Today I received a letter from Liechtenstein. I thought, this is interesting. I read the letter because it mentioned a new mark from my company: Order Made.

    I was not suspicious, I was thinking maybe they were going to say something such as: "this is our mark, go away." But since I was registering it in the U.S. the chances were slim.

    The letter is from International Data Medium Anstalt (IDM). I have never ever heard of that company. So obviously I searched on the Internet and the first thing to pop-up is an attorney/legal website saying that you should be careful and they have ...