Slashdot Mirror
Hit Man Email Scammer Back With a Vengeance
coondoggie writes "The online Hitman scammer, who threatens to kill recipients if they do not pay thousands of dollars to the sender, is still sending out thousands of emails and the FBI is again today warning users to ignore the spam and report any incidents to the Internet Crime Complaint Center. Two new versions of the scheme began appearing in July 2008, the FBI said. One instructed the recipient to contact a telephone number contained in the e-mail and the other claimed the recipient or a 'loved one' was going to be kidnapped unless a ransom was paid."
sending out death threats to all and sundry . . . I hope law enforcement gets to the silly buggers before some real killers do
needs to meet offline hitman
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
Has the internet stabbing device been invented?
(from http://www.bash.org/?4281 )
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
This guy is ruining the legitimate hitman industry now that most of our (err, their) emails are ending up in spam bins. Better go check your spam bins people.
Well, pay me $1000 or your mother in law will receive this immortality drug...
The people who figure it's a scam realize their mistake too late. The gullible pay and live. In the end only people who click on everything and respond to spam will be left. *Wake up, you're having a nightmare!*
I thought it was standard procedure to first kidnap and then request a ransom. Why would people pay a ransom -provided they feel really threatened by the email - if noone is kidnapped yet? They can always pay ransom when the kidnapping is actually done?
I wouldn't expect to receive one of these unless you're wealthy and there's material out on the net attesting to the fact.
Unless you pay me $9000
Golly, I wish I had some mod points today...
I suspect you have to be gullible and paranoid with a dash of guilty conscience thrown in to fall for this scam.
Hey you... yeah you. The fat guy with cheetoh stained fingers and an external drive loaded with furry porn. Mod me up or I'll take all your action figures out of their original packaging.
Well, thanks to the Internet, I'm now bored with sex.
I just wish I had that much free time on my hands. Then again, I am reading Slashdot :p
It's a distraction to keep the attention away from Mexico where real kidnapping takes place.
Just a (conspiracy saturated) thought ...
mov ax,4c00h
int 21h
Since the collection method is identified in the absence of a reason to pay, this has to be SCO.
Do the world a favor and check yourself in to your local insane asylum.
Very Interesting, you just gave me the inspiration to buy the domain - OnlineHitman.com (Surprisingly enough it was available?)
http://www.danlew.com
ive been paying him for years. still alive.
me: 1, phantom interblag assassin: 0.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Is that a UK spelling or something? In AMERICA, we spell that vengeance.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
She's dead, Jim. :P
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Why are people calling this guy a 'scammer'? He sounds more like a simple extortionist.
Or is it simply that he is lying about murdering and kidnapping people, so tricking the victims into paying money when they get nothing in return? Maybe it would be more honest of him to really carry out the murders: then at least it wouldn't be a scam.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I think a great scam would go like this
"You dirty bastard, I know you just cheated on your wife, you should be ashamed. Pay me $100 or she'll know everything"
Cheating is very common, and fear will alter the judgment of the average person (It can't be a spam, how would they *know* I just cheated...). I bet lots of person would pay.
I don't consider blackmail a crime per se, but that would still be quite a disgusting practice.
\u262D = \u5350
Will Mr. Hitman accept as payment the bogus $14,000 cashier's check some Nigerian scammer sent me to buy my $11,000 car?
Will he Western Union the excess back to me?
If you ever want to build a collection of fake cashier's checks, list a car on Craigslist.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
This spammer isn't just stealing advertising and committing millions of instances of petty theft. A death threat is a felony in itself, and this clown is racking up enough separate crimes for his sentence to run to thousands of lifetimes.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Man, that's so old school. I already have a Hitman Pro!
80 CC D8 AF AE D3 AB 54 B7 2E CE 67 C7
Do I get to pick which relative? If I pay extra will he kidnap two of them? just curious how this works.
Slashdot needs to add a spam mod.
It was only recently that the Piranha brothers hit upon the other other operation, in which they threatened to kill the target unless he paid them the so-called "protection money".
Of course, Dinsdale is nowhere near as dangerous as Doug.
I am officially gone from
I saw a similar email back in March of this year (and I mentioned it on my web page). Just for amusement I tried to contact the sender - both through the from address and the address they asked I reply to - and act a little concerned. I never heard back from them (I'm guessing the email was shut down).
But really, the email was so vague it could have been sent to anyone. They didn't even mention me by name or location. I wasn't really the least bit concerned as it was sent to an old email address of mine anyways.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Perfect scenario for micropayments! You could send 2000 e-mails and hope one person will pony up $1000 to avoid any downfall, or you can send 2000 e-mails and offer to take them off your hitlist for a mere dollar. At a low 50% return rate, you've made the original $1000, and the potential for more is much higher!
Seriously, criminals these days.
I have your demanded payment in-hand. Meet me at 1234 Anystreet USA to collect same.
(loads .44 magnum and waits in darkened room)
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
I thought it was Windows Genuine Advantage.
exactly what is the aim ? I presume extortion of money which if you look at the online scam seem's to be the endpoint of most spam email why take this any more seriously than others ?
spam filters should be able to trace then endpoints... yet another reason why SPF and DKIM should be more widely deployed...
maybe the FBI might want to focus on forceing ISP's to identify who the sender is via technologies such as DKIM...
regards
John Jones
http://www.johnjones.me.uk
What if this kind of spam is sent to a politician? Will the politician treat it as spam, or get 50 police officers for round the clock protection?
Mod me +5 or I will assassinate you. Assassinate you HARD!
UTF-8: There and Back Again
One idiot spammer keeps making up addresses from my domain for his reply-to address. So of course I get all his mailer-daemon bounces. So two questions: first, if I could track him down, could I sue for damages? B, how hard is it typically to track the b-tards down?
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Someone want to post a sample of the mail, including the headers?
Huge Success!
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
I need to relax my spam filters so that I can join in the fun of toying with these asshole scammers.
Four months later they started another operation which they called 'The Other Operation'. In this racket they selected another victim and, by email, threatened not to beat him up if he didn't pay them.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
I wonder if some of the various solutions to ending the spam deluge such as micro transactions et al. would be taken up if this spammer actually started killing people.
to meet somebody called "Guido 'No Neck' Fangioni" I'd be inclined to disbelieve it (as I disbelieve ALL unsolicited email.)
Its not that some people don't hate me, (I'm sure I've pissed old ex-bosses off, and the like,) but I seriously doubt it'd be worth the risk of looking for a hit-person (they're NOT all male,) or the expense.
Basically, I'd say: "Well, you gotta do what you gotta do... But I AM armed, dangerous, a fuckin' lunatic, rich enough to devote some time to it, and if I decide to hunt your down, you'll never know about it, because ..." (And then I'd [trade secret] to convince him that he CAN be found.)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Well, not exactly. ;)
Mine was to have everybody throw a few cents in whenever they get a spam, creating a sort of bounty system - somebody would go after a proliferate spammer eventually.
I was going to have it set up as a death pool type system. You pay your money and guess a date. If you're right on the date, you split the money among everybody who got the right date.
Obviously the hitman has a leg up in such a scheme...
I don't read AC A human right
Time Cube guy? Is that you?
Had to be a mistake. Who could possibly want to kill arghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Additionally there's a new spam making rounds in my $INBOX lately with the subject "We have hijacked your baby".
Unless my baby is a sports car it really doesn't make much sense.
...the FBI is again today warning users to ignore the spam and report any incidents...
Which is it? Ignore or report?
The educational requirements to become an FBI agent are supposed to be pretty high. Wouldn't know it from their press releases. I remember during the hunt for the Unabomber they mentioned that a parcel's return address was "factitious."
With the amount of webcomics available, there has to be one with an internet stabbing device, and that comic is Achewood. I'm guessing it gets additional points for featuring outsourcing of the design to India, although no GRITS are involved.
http://m.assetbar.com/achewood/uua7ZTxW4
http://m.assetbar.com/achewood/uua2sNcSQ
http://m.assetbar.com/achewood/uua7HgdpB
http://m.assetbar.com/achewood/uuabCS8Bq
Everyone misunderstands the scam here.
TFA states that recipients respond, by e-mail or telephone, and prove they are real people. The SPAM is a way to get good e-mail address lists to sell or ID theft information.
Only Spammers outside the USA have the risk vs. reward advantage here. A US resident can't risk making a kidnapping or death threat. A foreign juristiction, say Russia, might not extradite over this.
If you are the hitman scammer - you tell you victim to do what? Wire transfer to his bank account? Mail him cash?
Isn't it supper easy to bust the scammer?
Just follow the money right?
What am I missing here?
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
Modded insightful? That's laughable. While some press releases are indeed rather comical, if you're unable to deduce the obvious meaning, you're just being a snide bugger about it. Honestly, I don't think anyone is liable to be confused that the FBI's statement implies that 1) recipients should ignore the threat in the spam and 2) report the incident. It isn't rocket science, it's English! Anything more verbose wouldn't fundamentally assist reader comprehension, so why bother including even more words to clarify meaning? Newspapers and other printed publications of that caliber are targeted toward a 5th grade reading level, so I think you'd be better off saving your energy and taking issue with them instead.
I've seen grammar nazis who raise a fairly decent point before but this sort of nitpicking is just ridiculous.
He who has no
I'm surprised that I didn't notice a comment about the perfect response to this scam:
Which will, of course require paying a storage fee of several thousand dollars. Since I am supporting my family and parents, I don't have this money, but perhaps the spammer can help me out...
All these scams involve foreign money. I'm still waiting for one based on US embezzlement. Something like:
Well, duh - of course it's to get money. There are some suckers who haven't spent all their money trying to collect big bucks from Nigeria, and sending out Herbal Fake Viagra pills is really just too much trouble when all you need to do for your money is refrain from shooting somebody. It's as much fun as baiting trolls.
There's certainly no need for the FBI to force ISPs to implement DKIM to identify senders of spam; to the extent that technologies like that work, ISPs that want to get rid of spamming users will use them, and ISPs that want to attract spammers will charge extra for allowing you to generate fake DKIM records.
Besides, why are you referencing the FBI when you're purporting to be in the UK? SPF won't help directly - its job is to prevent spammers from impersonating real users through forgery, though this does reduce some kinds of spam as well.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Sig 229 & HK-41 (Fed version) because I'm a retired federal officer.
That also depends how determine this female donkey orifice is, but I'm extremely determined to live so this female donkey orifice will die if this moron tries anything.
To turn in one of these emails.
I can ignore most scams, but KIDNAPPING!???
Well, I got to the FBI website and the wanted ALL my personal info and a bunch of other nonrelated info. ;-(
I just said No!
what kind of f***ing idiot would take emails like these seriously? "natural selection", i say.
Spammer sends out billions of spam, watches the pot grow, offs himself and knows that his wife and kids are set for life.
What we really need to do is make it "school districts only, one claim per district" and watch as the number of underfunded school districts drops asa drastically as the number of spammers.
Can't beat a double-positive.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.