If you don’t immediately clutch your purse or iPad when someone asks you for directions in a supermarket parking lot, it means you didn´t read “The Picking of Pepe’s Pocket,” published in this paper two months ago. That column dealt with shopping center scams popular in Guadalajara, but this time the focus is on e-mails. If you’re not too familiar with the subject, read on.
Thanks to the influence of my Mexican in-laws, I was able to open an e-mail account at a local university ´way back in the 1980’s. Checking my messages meant driving 20 kilometers into town, but I did it regularly. The earliest form of spam I recall seeing was akin to the chain letters that used to circulate in the days when mail came inside paper envelopes: “Send this message on to ten friends and good luck will come your way (and if you don´t, woe betide you).”
Now, when it came came to scams in those early days, they were more like pranks. For example, there was the classic Bill Gates Giveaway. I still remember how my eyes lit up the first time I read it!
“Bill Gates is sharing his fortune ... For every person that you forward this e-mail to, Microsoft will pay you $245.00. For every person that forwards it on, Microsoft will pay you $243.00. I thought this was a scam myself, but two weeks after receiving this message and forwarding it on. Microsoft contacted me for my address and within days, I receive a check for $24,800.00.”
By the way, the prevalence of typos and grammar mistakes in this last quote are typical of most Internet hoaxes.
That email, believe it or not, is still circulating today. Another one that just won’t die is the 1989 request to send a greeting card (in some versions, a business card) to a British boy named Craig Shergold who was dying of cancer and wanted to be in the Guinness Book of World Records for having received the most greeting cards. Well, there really was such a boy and by 1990, 16 million cards had reached him, making Craig’s wish come true.
Happily, his tumor was removed in 1999 and he survived. But the cards never stopped coming. The name and address of the original “dying boy” morphed again and again in subsequent messages and there’s actually a post office in Atlanta, Georgia that has turned over more than 100 million unclaimed cards to a local paper recycler. Snopes.com (a great place to check out hoaxes) estimates that over 200 million cards have been sent to Shergold, despite his family’s numerous requests to “stop the madness.”
In the early days of the Internet, I think no one dreamed how much money could be made from e-mails. But that didn’t last long.
Probably the all-time classic example of spam and scam combined is the letter form Nigeria. Typically, the writer claims to be the relative of a famous person in a far-off country, for example, the widow of the late Yasser Arafat or a businessman trying to liberate funds from corrupt government officials.
The writer wonders whether you (“Dearest”) would mind receiving “the sum of US$21,320,000” in your bank account for temporary holding. “Help me get the money out of my country,” pleads Widow Arafat, “before corrupt and evil officials can steal it.” Of course, you are offered a handsome fee for your help.
If you bite, the grieving widow will soon mention some minor obstacle to the bank transfer, which you can make vanish by sending her the first of many modest sums of money.
How could this possibly work? Who would ever believe it? Well, according to Snopes, people in the United States forked over 100 million dollars to Nigerian scammers in 1997 alone.
“A sucker is born every minute,” says BBC Cybercrimes investigator Ben Hammersley. “And when you send out five million emails, even a 0.01 percent success rate can be lucrative.”
Hammersley recently flew to Nigeria to interview some of these cybergrifters. He found that the “million-dollar” letters do put yams on Nigerian tables, but one local informant stated that chat-room relationships with “lonely but rich people” are far more lucrative. “I just tell my chat-room friend that my mom was rushed to the hospital last night, that she has cancer of the lungs or something, and now my family needs, like, 300,000 dollars ... and they send me the money!”
If you’ve only recently begun to use e-mail and you’d like to avoid making spammers and scammers rich, you can easily check the authenticity of a suspicious message by copying a little portion of it and googling it in quotes. If you see even a few results with the word “scam” mentioned, you need go no further. If you want more assurance or to dig deeper, check out a website like Snopes.com which keeps up on all the latest tricks.
Below you’ll find summaries of a few other typical email scams not mentioned above.
1. SOMETHING’S WRONG WITH YOUR E-MAIL/BANK ACCOUNT
“Our Record Indicates your account is not updated, which may lead to the close down of your account and its must be updated within 48 hours. Click on the link below UPDATENOW and follow the instructions ...”
(Yahoo, Hotmail and banks never send messages like this. Don’t click on links and don’t fill in any blanks.)
2. CONGRATULATIONS! YOU’VE WON A LOTTERY YOU NEVER ENTERED!
“We are pleased to inform you of the announcement today of winners of the DE LOTTO NETHERLANDS SWEEPSTAKES LOTTERY ... You/your company drew the lucky numbers.”
(Keep dreaming!)
2. THE ONE-LINER
“Hey! I found this interesting: http://clickinthisatyourperil.com.”
(Such “messages” frequently come from a friend’s email account which has been highjacked.)
4. A RELATIVE HAS LEFT YOU A FABULOUS INHERITANCE
“My name is Becky J. Harding, I am a senior partner in the firm of Midland Consulting Limited. We are conducting a standard process investigation on behalf of HSBC ... This investigation involves a client who shares the same surname with you ... The client died in testate and nominated no successor ...”
(In testate, eh? I wonder what that felt like?)
5. EARN EASY MONEY AS A MYSTERY SHOPPER
“We have a customer service survey assignment in your location for you.We will pay $200 per assignment which would come in the form of a cashiers check along with comprehensive details in regards your assignment. The job Entails an Evaluation process such as visiting Walmart, Rite-aid,Walgreen e.t.c. Send information below to get started ...”
(CBS News says they send you a fake check for a large amount, later asking you to return part of the money, which is then taken out of your bank account.)
If you’re a newcomer to using a computer, all this may seem discouraging, but in reality, as long as you delete suspicious messages and avoid clicking on links, you’ll probably do just fine. As an added bonus, if you are a teacher of English as a Foreign Language (as I am), you can always plan on retiring to Nigeria. It looks like they really need help.