Slashdot Mirror
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."
...after failing to pay Nigerian hitman.
--Rob
I don't think I could afford FOURTHY thousand dollars (American or otherwise) ;)
will work for Karma
Great!
Now I have to read even more spam in order to filter out the fake death threats from the real ones!
What happens if I mark a real death threat from my arch-nemesis as spam? I won't be ready to protect myself.
Let the bidding war begin!
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
They're going about this all wrong. Personally, I'd pay 5 or 10 bucks to have a certificate mailed to me from Nigeria certifying that I have indeed paid my way out of being "snipped".
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
Guess we have all the proof and reason we need to invade Nigeria now.
That was a scam?!?!
Boxing Equipment Reviews
At least this should bring in the FBI. Death threats crossing state lines has to qualify as an FBI/Justice Department investigation. Perhaps even the State Department if the email was really sent from a Nigerian server.
Note : - Your death has been paid for by someone you offended sometime
Bloody ex-wives.. i knew they were up to no good..
What would you do without a monitor? Sit and look stupid behind a keyboard and a mouse
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
I'm more than willing to hand over my 30% share of the 27 million dollars left by Sani Abacha, the late Nigerian dictator, if they call off assassinating me.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
So when a mail like this hits Bush's email account (taking in mind Dubya knows how to operate 'that Internet thing') , that would be a threat to him.
Would that finally let some agency take some serious actions against those scammers ?
So my years of using president@whitehouse.gov to register on forums and such has not been in vain?
Dear Mr Assassin
I am willing to pay the 40.000 USD to you as soon as possible.
However, since my money is an old war treasure (33.234.177 USD exactly) locked in an anonymous account in the Canaries, in order to pay you, I need someone in your country to act as intermediary. And God has put you on my way to help me achieve this holy task.
I just need you to send me 28.000 USD in advance processing fee and...
Don't theathe him - he typthes with a lithp.
Somebody I knew sometime ago used the most annoying Nailclippers. The sounds he produced were SNIP SNIP SNIP SNIP. All day long SNIP SNIP SNIP. I always hated that guy, I bet he is the one who is out to get me....I better pay, dying by nailclipper could take a long time........
Message from god, Please logoff, rebooting the Universe
Enlarge your penis... OR DIE!!
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.
Check this out!
Might be worth 40k not to have this guy chasing you around with those...
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
The surprising thing is that this individual provided bank account info.
This leaves the scammer far less anonymity than he would normally seek to have.
Especially given that this was a death threat, revealing account info of the sender or an associate of the sender on the first email seems not only out of character for scammers (who are increasingly protective of personal details recently) but downright stupid.
It sounds to me like somebody got the wrong idea with everybody raving about how much they love SpamAssassin. It was probably somebody who does not understand English very well (most likely from Soviet Russia) mistakenly thinking that people love it when spam assassinates you. Ah, the dangers of taking Slashdot too literally.
Section 323 of the Nigerian penal code:
Any person who, knowing the contents thereof, directly or indirectly causes any person to receive any writing threatening to kill any person is guilty of a felony, and is liable to imprisonment for seven years.
So no we're going to have start calling them 323s.
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
Page 25 of this pdf has a sample of this scam from when it was sent via snail-mail in 1994.
who are those slashdot people? they swept over like Mongol-Tartars.
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.