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419ers Diversify Into Assassination Threats?
Richardsonke1 writes "Just when you thought 419ers couldn't get any worse, now they are sending death threats, according to a story at The Register. The emails require you to 'produce a mandatory sum of US$40,000.00 {FOURTHY THOUSAND UNITED STATES DOLLARS} only,into our account given below in nigeria within ninety six hours{96},alternatively you will be SNIPPED and GUNNED down during the period of our oncoming anniversary of fifty years.' All joking of 'snipping' aside, for those people who fall for regular 419 emails, this would terrify many gullible web users."
If major governments can be convinced these are "terroristic threats" we might actually get some police action against these annoying criminals.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
It seems to me that the traffic of people making fun of them (baiters) is very high compared to the dumb people falling for the scam.
In fact, I've been following my friend's baits, and the scammers seem desperate, unwilling to cooperate if you ask for a picture of them or any other information. Contrast this with many months ago where they would take any pictures that you asked them.
Since most of the baiters play along with the scammers story to ridiculize them, the scammers are getting desperate and started to use this new scheme. It is hard to play along with a death threat, compared to, a petition of money for a church in nigeria.
"There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham
This is a logical step, after all the recent kidnappings / beheadings that have been going on in the Middle East.
Prey on people's fears -- that they could be snatched in broad daylight.
People won't fall for this (they might forward it to the police department, but people pay these guys in their ignorant attempts to GAIN money), but I do like the possibility of having government agencies now taking action due to actual threats being involved.
At least this should bring in the FBI. Death threats crossing state lines has to qualify as an FBI/Justice Department investigation.
Interstate fraud should involve the FBI as well, but they don't fully investigate 419 cases now. Until someone is gunned down, I expect the FBI will (probably unofficially) tell anyone that reports the emails to ignore them, despite the clearly illegal content.
Learn to love Alaska
Item: DHS is highly concerned with any kind of hacking or spamming under the umbrella of "critical infrastructure protection."
Item: the US has already been spun up once before by snipers and the threat thereof.
Question: Given the above, do you suppose that this kind of thing will be taken seriously by the government? Or, perhaps, the proper terminology would be "Too seriously."
And if so, what would be done about it? Probably nothing overseas; but what about the thousands of COMCAST and Cox Cable customers who leave themselves wide open to being hijacked to relay spam?
Don't ask me. I submitted the story and set it as "index" (the default) and for some reason the editor put it under your rights online.
"Men lie."
"Yeah, about sleeping with other women, but never about bioluminescent plankton."
-Dan Brown
when they send this e-mail to a Federal Agent, Judge, etc. personal e-mail address? Making a death threat on any of these persons is a felony and the US could seek extradition. Or mayby W. would consider this a terrorist threat and deliver a $40,000 piece of ordinance via the U.S. Air Force.
If I drive fast enough at the red light, it'll appear green.
Of course, that assumes that you're not planning to actually _go_ to Nigeria any time soon. The 419ers do sometimes kidnap and kill suckers who've gone there hunting for their money.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Sure hope we can finally get some real action now from all that (USA) government we pay for. I used to think I was doing the upstanding thing by occasionally taking the time to go to the FBI web site where they had an on-line form to report 419-like activity.
One of the questions was "Have you lost any money to [the scammers] yet?". At first I thought that question was trying to assess the degree of response that might be required, i.e., "You actually lost money? Then we'll work hard to catch the crooks and recover the stolen property", but in reality, I learned later, they were asking to see if I was engaging in criminal activity, i.e., "You sent them money? Fool, you deserve to lose because you were trying to obtain the promised windfall, which would be illegally transferred funds!"
You see, it is not illegal for the 419'ers to present these fabricated scenarios and ASK someone to send money. You ignore them and no crime has been committed, hence no call for law enforcement, a priori. The law gets broken when they actualize the extraction of your cash under these false pretenses, but then at that point you are complicite in moving the illegal activity forward.
Death threats, on the other hand are in fact illegal.
So when a mail like this hits Bush's email account, that would be a threat to him.
Yaas! Based on traffic to a couple of my older accounts, several of the 419 team are using the standard "10,000,000 VAL1D E-MA1LZ!!!" CD of addresses snarfed from UseNet and the WWW. Which, I believe, included "president@whitehouse.gov" in the list of... er... targets?
On the down side, while the Secret Service have no sense of humor ("We're paid not to", I was once told by a freind who's done Presidential detail), and while they keep a file of EVERY threats, they also don't investigate every threat in merionesianly proctological detail. Of course, they do check out a lot of them, but automated death threats sent to world+dog via e-mail would seem lower down the protective detail priority list than the crayon piece snail-mailed to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
You are Randy Thomas who lives on Bishop Street in Nadick, MA. You drive a Volkwagen Jetta that is "galactic blue". I could list your license plate too.
There is a whole lot of personal information online. Being a domain name holder (and including photos of your house and car on the site) makes it all the easier.
I agree that the scam is silly, but I think the average person might be shocked at the amount of information that can be gathered with a few searches.
That would be the fun thing....
:-)
reply back...
hello, I am an Ex-special forces Marine. By the time you read this email a friend of mine will already be on hias way to you and working hard to pay you the same favor.
I suggest you watch yourself, he is a bit of a twisted fellow, he takes his work extremely seriously and enjoys in performing the job in creative ways.
please give my condolences to your family about their loss.
the above states NOTHING that is specific in any way, and would only have meaning to someone that had sent the origional letter.
continue to email the person... "I hoped you enjoyed your dinner last night, The photos of you I just recieved from my friend suprised me how different things are there compared to here.
Again, please tell your family that I am truely sorry for their loss.
playing with their head will be quite fun and legal as you never EVER say anything threat related and you can use the old fortune teller tricks in making very generic statements that they will read believeing that you have someone there following them and waiting...
Just a thought.... and yes, I have done this before.. an ass in college told me that he will "fucking kill me" I had him so paranoid that he dropped out of school with-in 3 months. It was great
We have ordnance that cheap?
In fact, we do, or at least we did. There was something called the "lazydog" that was just a fist-sized chunk of iron with fins. They were shoveled out the back of a B-52 from high altitude. Kinetic energy did the rest. I don't know how widely-used or effective they were.
Nice work but the advantages of being too lazy to update win the day: I moved 6 months ago (to another place in Natick,) and my current car is dary grey. But the last name's right. :)
Your point is well taken, but since I know I make no effort to hide such info about me, I wouldn't be all that shocked to find that someone knows it (as I'm not in this case.)
I like the other ACs suggestion -- include just enough vague details with few enough common options each (hair/eye color, car color, some random names of "friends," etc.)
Mail that out to enough people and someone dumb enough matching enough of your guesses is bound to bite . . .
everything in moderation
Sorta like that Czech guy who walked into the Nigerian embassy in Prague and shot some random nigerians, because he was sick of the spam? Ouch.
Furthermore, the distaction from problems at home ability of Iraq is wearing out, so they need another distraction fast!
The Portland, OR field office told me, "Work it out with your local authorities, if they cannot help you, contact us." Now, keep in mind that I did my homework before calling the field office. Yahoo.com was even good enough to provide a free phone call from their legal council (kudos yahoo!) to explain to me *exactly* what I needed to do such that they could assist the authorities in a full investigation.
To make a long retort simply longer, the local yokels didn't know what to do. We got no joy with them because basically, the stalker had never shown up and brandished a weapon, or somehow vandalized property in a way we could proove or shot her dead on the doorstep.
We ended up getting results by simply *daily* badgering the detective who took the case. I walked him through everything from "how email works for dummies" to speaking with the DA to subpeona Yahoo.com for their mail records.
The whole ordeal took several months and the FBI's part in the entire deal (even though, as you correctly point out, these were serious threats of bodliy harm across state lines) was a fart in a hurricane. I would like to be able to give them props, but without a corpse, they apparently did not feel motivated.
Cheers,
-- RLJ
PS - serious note: I am amazed how many people I have related this story too who either know somebody in a similar situation or have been in this situation. Fixing this problem in my lady's life is one of the most positive things we have done to date. If you have questions how it worked or how to go about this, email me, I will respond - greg.crowe@gmail.com
Or the real sender is an enemy of the person with the account number.
Since when are assassination threats considered part of My Rights Online?
Maybe we're moving toward the world of H. Beam Piper's Lone Star Planet, where gunning down legislators was declared a legitimate expression of one's right to political speech.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Okay, the 419 scams are pretty weird to start with, but this... something about it just doesn't ring true. So far, there only seems to be one of these emails out there. It's pretty well known among the web-savvy that if you mention Nigeria in combination with any sum of money, you're probably talking about a scam. Throwing in assassination seems overkill.
This seems more likely to be a "Joe Job" to get someone else in trouble.
Happiness is relative, Based upon the way we live.
Oh, I'm sorry. I forgot; "They just wouldn't DO something like that!"
-FL
... unfortunately it's mostly Christians on top of the oil (who have their environment totally trashed during extraction), so invading for the sake of the Christians and the oil isn't a coherent policy. (Would we let that bother us?)
Does anyone know whether most of the Nigerian scammers are Muslim or Christian? The country's split about evenly betweent the two groups. If it's the Muslims, well, some of them are fairly free about killing people....
On the more serious side (more serious than murder?): Why doesn't the West simply cut off all electronic banking connections into Nigeria? Phone and Internet lines too? Obviously, because they have lots of oil. Still, if we cut them off, and they cut us off, who would give up first? Can the most-populated African country survive without the world?
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
It worked with mortage spammers, and I'm convinced that it would work equally with 419 spammers. It attacks them via the same statistical model that they use.
Spamming is based on two sem-related statistics:
What we're currently suffering under is #2: That was the initial response to spammers -- don't respond, and hope that they go away. Unfortunately, that's overwhelmed by #1. We just got it a bit wrong.
It's not that we shouldn't respond to them -- it's that we should not give them our business.
If everybody who was annoyed by spam (i.e. everybody reading this) spent 1 minute a day doing something intended to annoy the spamming community, we'd make their life hell. Remember: there's thousands of times as many of us as there are of them. 1 minute a day times the billion or so internet users out there would come to millions of man-hours would come to about 50,000 man-years per month. Even if our one-minute of work cost them an average of one second to respond to it, that would come to ovef 10,000 man=years/to deal with our counter-spamming over the next year -- and that's 24hour day years, not 8-hour shift-days.
Considering that there's only supposed to be about 100 or so hard-core spammers out there, that means that we're looking at about 100 person-years which means that (at 3 shifts/day), that each spammer would have to hire about 300 people just to shift thru our responses to find legitimate 'marks'.
And there are other things we can do to them too...
- Engage them in useless conversations.
- find out which credit cards they accept, and write/phone those companies asking them to dump them. (enough requests will cause them to do a profit-loss analysis)
- do anything you can think of that would cause them to lose time/money/energy.
Don't let the above list limit you. Come up with your own ideas. Remember -- You don't have to spend a large ammount of time on this. More to the point, you shouldn't spend a large ammount of time on this. The strength is in the numbers.Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
you shouldn't do this. Why is social acceptable for people to tease & bully people with speech impediments when it isn't if they've got other disabilities? Having a speech impediment ruined my time at school. I had no friends and was forced to drop out. I literally had people chaising me with knives, saying "want a bishcuit?" and trying to set me on fire because of this speech impediment. Meanwhile TV advertisements were being regularly run that showed those with speech impediments as being mentally retarded.
The worst thing about having a speech impediment is that people do not interpret it as being a disability like being paralysed, but being an integral reflection of the person's intelligency. People who would think of the 'poor dear' over someone in a wheelchair will view you with discust.
So please don't do this. Of course, I expect most people reading this article wouldn't care and just go "ha ha" like Nelson in the Simpsons. In my experience, most young males are highly abusive when given half a chance.