Slashdot Mirror
Man Arrested in Australia Over Nigerian E-mail Scam
slasher_14 writes "A 39 year old Sydney man has been arrested over the Nigerian Scam. Simultanious raids were conducted in two homes by police, who siezed computers and documents.
Over the last 6 months, Australian police have tracked about 1.5 million dollars. The man faces Dubbo Local court today, charged with 17 offenses." Hopefully this means my inbox will be seeing less of these e-mails.
Like... the centre of 419 spamming is Amsterdam and London AFAIK, and it's such a large business that arresting one guy is pretty much meaningless.
PCs should simply come with warning stickers: "ATTENTION: if anyone offers you money, advice on making money, or easy ways to make money, HE IS A CROOK. (if you don't believe us, please send $1000 to us in small bills IMMEDIATELY to learn it the hard way.)"
Ceci n'est pas une signature
http://www.secretservice.gov/alert419.shtml "The Financial Crimes Division of the Secret Service receives approximately 100 telephone calls from victims/potential victims and 300-500 pieces of related correspondence per day."
Here in the land of Oz, last night's broadcast news (and repeated this morning and again a few minutes ago on the mid-day news), this Australian arrest was part of multi-national raid involving basically every continent except Antarctica!!
IIRC some of the noteable arrests occured in Cairo, Amsterdam, Australia, Malaysia and Singapore. This was (is??) a global scam, but evidence is stacking up to suggest this Australian connection was one of the key players (not merely a pawn).
Since the US dollar tumbled recently, those jokes just aren't as funny.
A year ago AU$1.5 million AUD was US$10 or so. "these days" though, it's worth a little over US$1 million.
What I find humorous about the story is that it happened in Nyngan, of all places.
This is a site that was setup to fight the scam and to educate people.
" > These 419 scams (named after the nigerian police code) can be dangerous. There have been reports of where people have actually gone to foreign countries and then been kidnapped forcing the familes to pay a ransom note."
Sounds like natural selection to me. I'm surprised they figured out how to book the plane ticket.
Discovery channel had a special on these, and said they actually predated fax machines. Originally the scams were sent by first class mail (so, no, putting a stamp on spam will not stop it, at least in this case), then by international fax (again expensive) when fax machines were invented, then by email when that became available.
Then they explained that people were actually paying these spammers and going to foreign countries to meet them at the bank, etc. As if that was not bad enough, they interviewed a successful businessman and multimillionaire who gave them every last dime of his cash over a period of years! I guess that proves you don't have to be smart or even hard working to become a rich businessman in the US (though I haven't made it yet, and would not give the Nigerian spammers a dime). :P
The main 419 scammers are mostly in the Netherlands at the moment, but there are small pockets of individuals all over the world.
This "scum" they caught in Australia is believed to have defrauded people of OVER AU$6 million (about US$4.2 million), but the police only have tracked $1.5 million.
He has been caught by journalists in the past during the process of trying to deprive people of thousands of dollars and his face has been show on television which is why he moved to the "outback" away from cameras and started scamming using letters (snail mail) and the internet.
www.dnsstuff.com
With the three of them behind bars, spam will pretty much cease to exist forever.
You know, I'm considering grepping my incoming e-mail for any messages which contain URLs with the term "biz" anywhere. Especially when .biz is the TLD. Discarding the message and teergrubing the originating server the moment they send an URL like that.
By my quick estimate, that would get rid of everything except the Nigerian spams... which are hopefully a thing of the past; I hope the sender - like all other spammers - gets colorectal cancer.
Anyone have any thoughts or experience with this?
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
They have an excellent How-to document here if you want to start up your own. They're not stupid people.. greedy people.
(Like email at fake addresses, fake phone numbers and the like.)
.org domain (with no whois info)
.org, it's the .biz that spammer appear to favour anyway.
Remember that ICANN requires registrar to terminate any domain in 14 days if whois information is bogus. So the spammers have few choices:
1: use correct info and get tracked.
2: use fake info and luse the domain
3: use somene elses info and get sued for identity theft
Their response to me when I tried to complain about a spammer using a
What was the domain anyway?
Are you sure you use the right whois server? some untransitioned domains don't show up in whois.pir.org yet. If there really is no contact info, you should contact the registrar and tell them that the mentioned domain has fraudulent whois data. It's the registrars responsibility to maintain correctness in whois database, not the registrys AFAIk.
And I don't know where you get the crudge against
signatures pending - ansa@kos.to - (dont mail there)
"Thank you for your $10,000, but now we need another $8,000 because of this new snag."
Worry of offending and thus losing the investment/s already made, lures people into upping the ante many times, probably while their stomach juices become increasingly more acidic and they tell themselves ever larger lies so as to be reassured that they are not being ripped off.
In some cases, people have finally been invited/persuaded to fly into Nigeria to settle the matter, (or wherever the scam is based), and have there been kidnapped and held for ransom.
There are dangerous, organized and well-funded people behind this scam. I hear they didn't just arrest some asshole in Australia, but an international ring of assholes. May they burn together in flaming tar for a thousand years.
Somebody here already noted. . . "You can't scam an honest person." --Unfortunately, this is not true. I know people who would from their kindness want to loan money with no hope or desire for reward in order to help somebody out.
Greed is certainly a big, big lure, but Vigilance and Knowledge are also required to ensure safety. I have a rule of thumb: "Never help a greedy person. Never help those who won't help themselves." --Rendering help to a selfish person means there is no chance of the favor being returned to you or anybody else, thus any energy spent in this way is simply sucked out of circulation. Pointless. "Pay It Forward" works wonderfully, but only if people actively avoid assholes and vampires.
-FL