Snoskred On Scams

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Will You Be Scammed With An Online Job Offer?

5 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

I’ve already made 5 million online this year, so I’m not looking for any jobs online. If you are looking for work online, you need to read my guest post over at I’ve Tried That so you can avoid the scams.

Snoskred on Fake Check Scams and Scambaiting

Don’t forget to pass the message on to your friends and family. You won’t forgive yourself if they get scammed and you had the knowledge to stop it from happening.

Let your friends and family know about the Scam-O-Matic – a web form which can look at an email and tell you if the email looks like a known scam. Is this email a scam? Ask the Scam-O-Matic.

job scams, scambaiting, scams

Snoskred made 5 MILLION DOLLARS online this year!

44 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

thecheck

This article is a must read, not because I’m going to tell you how you can make your OWN 5 million online but because I have some very important information for you.

What I want to talk to you about is how NOT to make money online.

I currently have 5 million dollars worth of fake checks in my possession.

In some countries these are called bank drafts, or cheques*. Truly, I do have them. I’ll give you a link to take a look at them a little further down the page and there’s some photos here in this article too. They came to me from scammers on the internet, who I scam baited – that means I pretended to be a real victim.

I don’t suggest you do the same thing but I do suggest you read this article and please help me to get the word out there on the internet about this scam and other scams. Below I talk about some of the ways you can help.

Something you may not know about checks –

When banks say a check has “cleared” they simply mean the funds are available to you.

The funds being made available is no guarantee of the check being good.

A check can bounce up to a *year* after you bank it.


Seriously! The funds are available to you because in many countries (e.g. the USA, Australia and others) the funds have to be made available by law, however if it turns out to be counterfeit or stolen or the issuer does not have sufficient funds in their account the bank will quickly make the funds UNavailable to you. If you have spent the funds, they will put you into the minus – and charge you for that as well, usually. If you did bank a fake or stolen check at first it would seem to clear, the funds would be there for you to withdraw and spend.

Don’t trust that teller –

You might even ask the teller – has this check cleared, and you would usually be told YES – absolutely it has. Just like most victims this happens to. They do not get training in this area. In fact most people who work in banks don’t know how checks really work. The scammers DO know how checks work and they make full use of this lack of education.

How you get the fake check –

– A scammer might email you with a work at home job offer like a payment officer, a company representative or book keeper.
– You may apply for a job you have seen advertised.
– You may be selling something online (possibly via Ebay or Craigslist or Etsy but these scammers will try anywhere you can sell things).
– You might be a breeder of dogs, cats, any animal – they will pretend to want to buy one of the animals.
– You might have a rental house or holiday home and they pretend they want to rent it from you.
– There’s thousands of other possible scenarios but essentially it boils down to someone you don’t know wanting to pay you.
– They don’t just use checks either – they may offer money orders or travellers checks.
– Often they will send a check for more than the item you are selling is worth, and they want you to send the balance back to them. They will use many excuses for doing this.
– They may send you a check and once it has cleared they will no longer want the item – someone in their family will be ill or die and they need the money back urgently
– They will usually want you to send the money by Western Union, Moneygram or deposited into a bank account they give you.

When you send the money –

So the check has cleared, and you figure everything is fine if the bank says the check has cleared. Some victims have even asked to have it in writing, because they were so sure the check would *not* clear. Victims have been given confirmation in writing only to find having something in writing from the bank won’t help when things go wrong.

Within days, weeks, months, up to a year later the bank will find it was counterfeit or stolen and they will take the money back and hold YOU responsible. In the US, you could actually be arrested for check fraud. Many scam victims have been – an example and a good article here.

About my checks –

The Nigerian 419 scammers have been very helpful to me because they have sent me an awful lot of fakes – fake checks – cheques – bank drafts – money orders – travellers checks. Some good, some terrible. When I started out trying to collect a few fake checks I thought it would be cool to hang them on a wall, sort of like a gallery of fraudulent instruments. And so I did..

ce3

I now have so many I would need to actually devote a room full of walls to it. These are in addition to the ones hung on my wall already. I laminate them so they’ll stay in good condition.

smalls

bigs

Here’s a bit of a closer look at the 16 new fraudulent instruments from scammers I just laminated today. Click on this picture for a much larger view.

alltogether

You’ll note there is a lot of pink painting done on these checks – that is because scammers only need a few vital details in order to counterfeit a check. These are generally your name and your bank account information. When that information is present on a real-looking check, the bank will always pay it! The scammers don’t need to steal checks, they just print them out.

NEVER give out your bank details online.

Many companies have their details available on the net in case you want to make a payment to them – and scammers take full advantage of that. They make checks with the details of those companies and often these checks take the longest to bounce – it isn’t until the accountant spots the transactions later that the bank will find out the checks were not written by the company. That is why most of these checks have company names on them. I always contact the companies whose names appear on the checks to let them know what is going on.

How Snoskred baits check scammers –

– I use a safe post office box which cannot be traced back to me – do not try this at home, readers, for your own safety. These guys are criminals. Giving them your home address to send fake checks to is NOT a good idea.
– I use a special tool to bait the scammers. This involves minimum effort on my part. The tool does all the baiting for me. All I have to do is click my mouse once, and then checks come to me as a surprise in the mail. The tool takes care of all communication with the scammer, writes the emails, sends them, and it is truly amazing.
– If you want to try baiting scammers, websites like 419eater and theScambaiter have mentor programs which can get you baiting safely. Please don’t try it without knowing how to stay safe. Nobody wants a scammer turning up on their doorstep.

Just one other note..

about assuming scam victims must be stupid.. ;) Don’t assume, it makes an ass out of you and me, as the old saying goes.

Thousands of new people visit the internet for the first time every day. Many of the new visitors are elderly or have just retired and figure now is a good time to find out about this newfangled internet. These people have their entire life savings just waiting to send to a scammer who gets in and hooks them before they know it is a scam. Many scam victims are stay at home moms who are looking for a bit of extra income. Many are new to computers. Just because YOU are aware of these scams does not automatically mean everyone else is.

People fall for these scams constantly and it has nothing to do with intelligence or greed or any other things like that. They simply have not been educated that these are scams. The scammers are always thinking up new scams, so never think YOU are safe from being scammed – they might try something on you that you haven’t heard of yet. This happens to experienced internet users daily. Nobody is 100% immune – don’t fool yourself into being fooled by a scammer.

You have to realize these scammers work full time on these scams – this is what they do for a living and they know how to get money out of people. There’s another problem in that people associate Nigeria with these scams – and the scammers know this, so they pretend they are elsewhere in the world. So some people who know about NIGERIAN scams think – this has nothing to do with Nigeria, this person is in the UK, US, Europe, Australia, it must be ok.

Many scammers use FREE services like this to get a UK telephone number which redirects to their Nigerian mobile phone. So a victim calls a UK number to speak to them – never knowing their call is redirected to Nigeria. These free services are available for most other countries too.

The scammers are criminals, and the victims are victims of a crime – and they are unlikely to report it because people will think they are stupid. This means our law enforcement people cannot get an accurate picture of how big a problem this is.

Make sure you tell your friends and family about these scams – if you assume they know, you might find out you are wrong. If it happens to someone you love, you’ll realize I am right, it’s not about intelligence. It’s about lack of education – and YOU have the power to educate them.

How YOU can help!

– Mention today’s blog post on YOUR blog so all the readers of your blog can be educated on this important topic. Feel free to link to this post.
– Link to this article in my internet safety series which speaks about these scams.
– Ask me via my contact page to guest post on your blog on the topic of scams to help educate your readers.
– If you know anyone who has any questions about these scams I am only an email away. However there are some great websites on the internet that try to help as well – Scamwarners Scam Victims United – Fraud Aid –
– Let the readers of your blog know about the Scam-O-Matic – a web form which can look at an email and tell you if the email looks like a known scam. Is this email a scam? Ask the Scam-O-Matic –
– Stumble this blog post with Stumbleupon, if you are a member.
– Email a link to today’s blog post to your friends and family.
– Now you know about this scam – there are so many others out there. Always ask if you’re not sure. The Scamwarners forum “Is this a Scam” is a good place to post a question you might have.

Further Reading And Viewing –

Avoid Fake Check Scams: Five Things You Should Know
Fake Check Scams
More About Job Scams – A Guest Post By Snoskred
About the 419 Scam
Scam Victims United
60 Minutes Australia – The Big Sting – story transcript of a now missing video story, well worth reading.
60 Minutes Australia – The Big Sting II – story transcript of another now missing video

For those in the USA –

Consumer group warns of growing check scam.

Please note this quote in the above article by the executive vice-president of the American Banking Association: “Federal law requires banks to make the funds you deposit available quickly, but it’s important for consumers to know that just because you can withdraw the money doesn’t mean the check is good,” said Edward Yingling, executive vice president for ABA.”

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

If you had never heard of these scams before, if you or someone you know has been scammed, or if you have any thoughts on this topic, I’d love to hear from you. Comments are closed but you can contact me via email – or comment on one of the more recent scam related posts on this blog, which you can find under the Scams category, click here for the most recent scam posts..

* I apologise for using the word check though here in Australia we call them cheques, I’m so used to emailing US scam victims on this topic and they don’t know what “cheques” are usually. ;)

Updated 27/02/2015 – to remove dead links and put in replacement links

fake checks, scam victims are not stupid, scambaiting, scams

What will a scammer do for money?

6 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

Almost anything you demand, it seems. Previously in my other scambaits, I’ve got them to p@int butterflies on their f@ces. pose naked, hold a sign, and hold my characters photograph. Other scambaiters have gone even further. It is now getting difficult for me to think of new things to ask them to do.

But one day I was a bit bored, I had some spare time, and so I wrote a new baiting script and hooked up a few lads to it. I don’t do any baiting manually these days, it’s all done with tools that make it mostly automatic for me. Note – these aren’t tools that regular humans can get access to – this is something only long time scambaiters can use. So if you want to use it, get into baiting – when the time is right you’ll be given access.

Scammers complain wildly when you ask them to do something for you instead of you just rolling over and sending them money by Western Union or Moneygram or into their bank account.

They practically cry.

They try to negotiate their way out of what I’m asking them to do.

They bargain.

They tell me they’re under house arrest, or don’t have a camera and need me to send money to buy them one, or they want me to send my photo to them in the same pose before they will do as I ask.

They then search the internet for photographs of what I have asked them to do and send that to me, pretending it is them. No way, I can google too, you know. (that’s why I put the @ in p@int f@ces, so they don’t wind up here!)

So today, less than a month after I set this script up, I got my first *real* photo back. I’d asked the lads to p@int their f@ces like Gene Simmons from Kiss, and this lad did make a little bit of an effort.

gene1

It’s a bad quality pic but I am reasonably sure it is genuine. I’m going to rewrite this script and see if I can’t get some more lads to do it. :)

scambaiting, scams

Weekly Wrap Up 18/06/07

1 Comment Posted on by Snoskred

Welcome back to me! ;) Very relieved to be back at home, I won’t lie to ya’all. It was nice to go away but it is even nicer to return to one’s waterbed and kitties. ;)

A HUGE thank you to Sephy for helping me out here on the blog and posting the pics I emailed to him from my mobile phone which have been coming to you as a surprise over the weekend.

I have not yet logged into my google reader but I am looking forward to going in and catching up with what everyone has been up to.

So, the week in review. I talked about how things are different in the country, I had some adventures in hair dying and a lovely beach walk with photos for ya’all. One really important post I’d like to draw your attention to, written by Sephy. It’s over on his blog and it is regarding the Assassination scam. These scammers do a lot of really terrible things but this is by far the worst type of scam out there and the most scary for anyone who receives it. Thanks to Sephy posting it, a lot of people have found his blog and know it’s just the scammers trying to get money out of people they know nothing about and there’s no assassination teams watching them. It’s a huge relief for those people who received the email.

If any bloggers reading this could do us a favour and help us educate more people on these scams by linking to that post and perhaps also to my internet safety post part six which talks about those scams, that would be fantastic. In case you missed it, here’s links to Internet safety part one – two – three – four – five – six. I’m going to put this series at the top of the right sidebar for a little bit, to make it easier for people to find.

Funny search terms this week –
headache, foggy memo
email shenanigans
plane panti hose
hairy boys
animals diecan’t turn over
home hair dying green
jammed acrylic nail and lifted my real nail
why does sunscreen make acrylic nails sticky? (does it? I didn’t know this)
scary pictures of sharks and people (I know where to find this but it scared me so much I’m not telling)
rob lowe naked (yeah, I wish I knew where to find that too!)

And a lot of Morten Harket queries.. ;) Morten Harket was the number one search term this week.
is morten harket gay? (You’d have to ask him, I’m voting no but he does wear a lot of leather so I can understand the general confusion)
is morten harket married? (He was, yes)
morten harket and his wife
morten harket naked pics (sorry, I don’t have any, if you find them let ME know!)
how tall is morten harket

We’re still averaging 700 unique visitors a week here – that doesn’t count return visits during the week. I am still in the middle of the blogging chicks commenting challenge but didn’t get too much done last week thanks to the trip, so hopefully this week I’ll get busy. :)

So things are back to normal with me returning home, and you can look forward to some quality blogging this week as well as lovely photos of Ikea purchases and the Sydney Harbor Bridge at night. I’m hoping to write another blog about differences between the country and city this week, as well as something about vertigo and pilots. No, that won’t be as boring as it sounds. ;)

Internet Safety, Morten Harket, weekly wrap up

The Assasination Scam

1 Comment Posted on by Snoskred

Sephy got a great example of the newest weapon used by the 419 scammers yesterday. His baiting character – a very famous sports person who I can’t name for the scammers can google too – is apparently being stalked by a spy team in preparation for the execution team to arrive and kill him.

How does this scam work? Basically they threaten people into giving them money. The scammers tell victims that they have been paid money to kill them, but if the victim pays money they will not kill them. Of course the scammer does not even know who they are, where they are, or anything like that – he’s just taking a chance that this email will freak them out and make them pay money. Can you imagine an elderly person getting a threatening mail like that? Of course they pay. ;(

You can see the threat email for yourself here – Sephy’s Platzish –

scam victims are not stupid, scambaiting

Internet Scams

Leave a comment Posted on by Snoskred

A commenter on the past post wrote –

OMG, anyone dumb enough to fall for these so called ‘scams’ almost deserve it. If you fall for this, eventually you are gonna give your money away to someone, why not them?

How can someone be so naive about these e-mails etc and think they are real? i mean come on, where have you been the last 20 years?????

It’s a simple matter of education. A lot of the people scammed are elderly or not computer literate. They are new to the internet, and they do not know these things have been around for 20 years. It is interesting to me that many people want to place the blame on the victim of this crime rather than on the *criminals* who trick people.

The lottery scams are probably the most successful for the scammers as far as easy fast money. Many people are already of the belief that they will win Lotto at some point during their life. They believe it will happen and some of them buy a lot of lotto tickets for many different lotteries. When they get this email all rational thought goes out of their head, and all they think is “I knew it would happen one day, and finally all my dreams have come true”.

And note that in some countries, you can actually get an email from the lotto company telling you that you have won – the UK lottery companies do this as well as other countries. Of course, you have to buy a ticket for it to be legitimate. These scammers are good at what they do. So good that they will cover a lot of the questions you might have in their first email. For example – from the lotto scams repository –

An exclusive list of email addresses of thousands of individual and corporate bodies were picked by automated random computer search from the internet. No tickets were sold.

The victims reply to the scammer and usually several emails go back and forward before they are told of any fees. The amount will always be small, and it will sound reasonable – oh, I only have to pay $100 in courier fees to get my check? Oh, they want to send it by courier so it will be safe and not get stolen? Well, it’s a small price to pay to get the millions I have won. And in their heads, they have already SPENT that money. In fact they’ve spent it long before that email arrives – I know I have plans for my $20 million dollar win, don’t you?

Once the first $100 is paid, they might have a problem with customs letting the courier into the country, they might have to pay taxes, there’s plenty of different tricks the scammers use. This time the amount will be more, maybe $600-1000. Again, the victim thinks – it’s a small price to pay to get my money. The victim will probably try to negotiate with the scammer to pay less – can you take it out of the money once I get my winnings, I don’t have enough to pay that right now but I can pay and give you the rest when I get my winnings. And of course the scammer will take anything the victim will give.

They might then refer the victim to a fake bank website. These can look extremely real. The victim gives all their banking information to the scammers. The scammers use that information to make fake checks in the victim’s name, and they may have got credit card info as well, which they will have shared and/or sold to other scammers. They may send a file to the victim which contains a keylogger.

If the victim does not cooperate, they will often be threatened. We have all your information. We know where you live. Pay up or we’ll send someone around. This can be especially upsetting to elderly victims.

The scammers use email extractor programs to retrieve email addresses from the internet. They are especially keen on countries which do not have a good understanding of English. India seems to be the current favourite of the scammers, Russia and Asia are always popular. They will send out *thousands* of emails over the course of a day, and they usually get about a 10% reply rate but higher in non-english speaking countries. They do this each day. Except Sundays, when they go to Church in the morning with all their scammer friends, then back to the internet cafes in the afternoon for a little more spamming and scamming.

The thing people don’t understand about this scam is that the victims get emotionally and financially invested in them. It seems so obvious that it’s a scam to those of us educated on the topic but they are not looking at it logically like we are.

I really dislike it when people seem to feel morally or intellectually superior to victims of these scams. It can happen to *anyone* who doesn’t know about them. That is a large amount of people on this planet.

Nobody deserves to be scammed. Absolutely nobody.

Internet Safety, scam victims are not stupid, scambaiting

Scam article on 60 minutes.

2 Comments Posted on by Snoskred

I’d actually talked to the producer of this story about being *in* it, with regard to scambaiting and my butterfly bait which does have excellent scammer pics.. The way things worked out, they got help from the EFCC and the story had a lot of story without adding scambaiting to it.

And I’ll be honest, I’m relieved not to have done it. I would have done it in the hope of people being educated but as a scambaiter it was a fairly scary idea and if I had done it I would have been like a cat on a hot tin roof. We’re all about flying under the radar.

The criminals who do the scamming are actually pretty racist in their own way. They think it’s ok to scam westerners because we all have plenty of money. It is accepted in their culture to do this and make money out of it.

Sometime in the next few weeks I have a pretty exciting announcement coming up which involves these scams. So keep checking back to see what the deal is. :)

scam victims are not stupid, scambaiting

Site Meters.

Leave a comment Posted on by Snoskred

Chani, close your eyes, because I have to talk about sitemeters for a minute. Sitemeter, the thing I use to keep an eye on who is coming here and how they’re getting here, seems to have changed things on their site and in fact it does not work at all in Firefox for me. I opened up Microsoft Internet Explorer (shudder) to see if it still worked and it did but they’d installed a bunch of things like flash on the site, and I HATE flash with a passion.

Never fear, for I have a backup plan. When it comes to trackers they are fairly unreliable. I actually had two here on the site, sitemeter and stat counter, and never the two did agree. In fact sometimes they had serious disagreements. I could understand if maybe one had 10 more visitors than the other, but sometimes we are talking differences of 100 or more. And considering both these counters only show you the last 100 visits, it did get annoying.

Never fear my friends for as always, Google has a solution. Google Analytics. And as always when these things happen I am one of the last to know and get on the boat. I am really happy about this new development because of the 419 blogs that we have. They’re 419 Letter Repository, Job Scam Repository, Lotto Scam Repository and Miscellaneous Scam Repository.

These sites get a LOT of hits. Let’s take a look at the Lotto Scam Repository. Since January 1 this year, there have been 28,298 unique visitors on the site with 40,931 page loads. And a lot of these visitors get there by searching for scammer email addresses, scammer telephone numbers, the names scammers use in lotteries. For example –

7 lottoscams.blogspot.com
6 staatspromonl
4 barrister desmond oconnor
4 (mrs.) angella richardson (program co-coordinator.)
3 vodafone.nl vodafone stake incorporation
2 euromilliones2007
2 coventry lottery leiden
2 for: smith carpenter afro-asian zonal cordinator. bigtime lotto in
1 1.64% agentelizabethgary01 tel #
1 seat automobile e-mail promotion
1 do an national australianlottery exist like lotto australia
1 lotto bill gates 1 000 000 gbp
1 bv powerball lottery e-wheel e-game 2007
1 eu lotto from telephone
1 microsoft winning notification
1 hans-peter schössler
1 microsoft award teammicrosoft corporation #1 microsoft wayredmond, wa 98052.
1 australian lottery board
1 your email address has won the uk national lottery games!!!
1 italian superenalotto 2007/winning notification !!!
1 microsoft uk promotions
1 agentelizabethgary01@ tel #
1 online lottery 2007 webnet national/international lottery
1 microsoft_agent230 @yahoo.co.uk
1 awareness promotional lottery
1 florina_215 @hotmail.com
1 new about bmw lottery international programs held on the 8th of may 2007 in london uk.
1 the board of directors, members and staff of the inte
1 yahoo/microsoft promotions {congratulations you are a winner} !!! …
1 gameboardcente @aim.com
1 alyson & associates u.k
1 the free lotto company snopes
1 yahoo award winning notification ; your email adress emerged as a
1 grupo bilbao security company sl
1 uk online lottery raffle draw held on may 1st, 2007.
1 guiness stout promotion agent
1 rsa canada lottery prize claim form
1 dayzers lottery headquarters
1 peugeot auto-mobiles headquarters, 19 ul,

But these trackers *only* track the last 100 visits. And for a while there we tried to keep track of the search terms – while the traffic was low we could visit once a day and copy and paste what you see above into a spreadsheet. However now, this site is getting anywhere between 200-500 unique visitors a day. It’s not possible to keep track – you’d have to log in every 4 hours or so to make sure you have the info. Of course you can have more than the last 100 visits tracked but it costs money – and I’m already spending plenty on internet related things like domain names and various other things.

But now, google analytics is going to solve this problem for me, and I am really excited about it. Being able to see this kind of information will really help us know how we can help scam victims better find out that they are being scammed.

The reason we created those 419 scam mail blogs was simply so that a scam victim could google things that appear in scammer mails and it would come back with the word scam. If you look for most of those terms you’ll find them on other sites as well, like Joe Wein’s fantastic site. In fact Joe Wein runs a huge scammer blacklist of email addresses which daily saves victims from being scammed. He’s also extremely helpful to us baiters. ;)

It was a massive headache to get the blogs working right, we had all kinds of issues with mail to blogger, we at one stage were posting things manually to the blog, it still gets a lot more mail than actually gets published there, and google sends a lot of the scam mail to the spam trap, which means it doesn’t get published.

If you get scam emails, please don’t just delete them. You can put them into Joe Wein’s Scam-o-matic or you can have a look here to see how to forward them to him. You’re probably getting scam mails that we don’t get – and by putting them into the scam-o-matic and having those scammers blacklisted you too can help prevent victims being scammed.

Internet Safety, scambaiting, scams

Let it rain..

Leave a comment Posted on by Snoskred

It’s been raining since about 2pm yesterday. It’s good for many reasons, one of which being it is keeping the screaming kids inside. The peace is a welcome change.

Yesterday the other half had a work thing on and he had to go to Wollongong, he didn’t get back until after 10. So I got stuck into some baiting work I had to do and really got a lot done.

I have this check scammer at the moment who sent me a check, and I now am trying to make him snap. I told him his 30 grand was stolen out of my kitchen cupboards by a burglar. I was trying to talk to him on the phone and he kept hanging up, so I started calling him nasty words. He kept saying it was the network (and it probably was) but I don’t care.

So then I told him that the police got the money back and now I’m not sending any of it, I bought me a nice big boat. He’s still being polite to me trying to get me to send the money. I’ll keep pushing and hopefully he’ll break and curse me and give me death threats.. :)

It’s getting cold, and I feel blah. I think I’m getting yet another cold.

scambaiting, weather

Internet Safety & Scams – What You Need To Know.

3 Comments Posted on by Snoskred


Everybody wants something,
they’ll never give up.
Everybody wants something,
they’ll take your money and never give up.

The lyrics above may be familiar to fans of Degrassi, a long ago tv show. However they apply on a daily basis when you are on the internet.

As I type this right now there are over 100,000 people, most of them in Nigeria but also in other countries all over the world including the US and UK who wake up in the morning and their day job is to SCAM people. Yes, that is what they do for a living. And some of them do it so well, their lifestyle includes gold chains and BMW’s.

So here’s a few things you should know about internet scammers. First of all, the golden rule.

NO MONEY IS COMING TO YOU AS A SURPRISE IN YOUR EMAIL INBOX.

Never, not ever, no way, no how. :)

The Next Of Kin, or Advance Fee Fraud scam.

This message may come as a surprise to you, but there are no wives of dead world leaders with trunkboxes full of money that they want to share with you if only you will help them. There is nobody in Africa with a large fund that needs to go into your bank account. Nobody over there has cancer and a large fund that they’d like you to give to charity. Nobody really wants you to stand in as next of kin. What they want is your money, and they’ll never give up.

How these scams work is, they tempt you with large sums of money. Then there’s a small fee that must be paid. Then there’s another, and another, and another. I recently spoke to a victim who has been paying his scammers for *five* years.

And people say oh, how can anyone be so stupid? It’s because they invested, emotionally and financially into the scam and they find it very difficult to stop. It is like gambling, only you’ll never win with these scammers. Here is a good article which gives you a bit of info on how these scams work – The Perfect Mark

NEVER, EVER, REPLY TO A SCAM EMAIL.

Once they know you exist, you’ll get every scam email known to man, and they will keep trying in the hope you will fall for one of them. So you’ll get scam emails until the end of time.

The JOB scam.

This particular scam is becoming more and more popular, especially in Australia. Who wouldn’t like a bit of easy money? You get an email that offers you a job as a company representative. If you take the job, you will receive fraudulent or possibly stolen cheques from the scammers. You put them in your bank, the bank will “clear” them and then you send the money back to the scammer, usually by Western Union or Moneygram. The only trouble is, “clear” means nothing.

Please note this quote in this article by the executive vice-president of the American Banking Association: “Federal law requires banks to make the funds you deposit available quickly, but it’s important for consumers to know that just because you can withdraw the money doesn’t mean the cheque is good,” said Edward Yingling, executive vice president for ABA.”

That applies equally to all countries that we know of – Australia also. Just because the bank “clears” the cheque does not mean the money is really there for you to spend. It can take up to a YEAR for a cheque to bounce.

In the US, scam victims are often ARRESTED for banking the fake cheques. This adds insult to often serious financial injury!

As a scambaiter, I have a safe mailing address where the scammers post me things, and I have quite a collection of these fake checks. Take a look here. There is over 3 million dollars worth of fake checks there. Don’t try this at home people, it isn’t safe. You can learn how to do it safely, if you want to know where email me.

The Lottery Scam.

You get an email telling you that you have won the lottery! How many people dream of winning lotto, quitting work, having a life of travel and luxury. So you’re pretty excited, and you reply saying “How can I get my winnings?” – it’s simple. Just pay a small payment. But that won’t be the end of the payments, and you haven’t won lotto at all, and you’ll never see any money or be able to quit work, in fact you might have to work more to make up for the money you send.

I believe this scam is one of the most unpleasant of them all – it gives people hope, and then crushes it into little pieces. :(

There’s a lot more scams. Love. Ebay. Rental. Puppy. Children. Donations. And while I write this these scammers are coming up with new and better ways to scam people out of their money. Joe Wein’s website lists many of the types of scams and how they work. Joe is also an incredibly nice guy who has helped me with an incredible amount of stuff all designed to hurt the scammers.

You can report any scam mail you receive and check to see if it is a scam by using the Scam-O-Matic – all mails from scammers that you submit are added to the blacklist which helps scam victims find out that it’s a scam.

My advice is to keep up to date with the scams, and if you ever have any questions visit Scamwarners Is This A Scam forum and ask – is this a scam?

If you have any questions I am only ever an email away – Contact Snoskred – and always willing to help when it comes to this kind of thing. ;)

email safety, Internet Safety, scam victims are not stupid, scams