NEW (to me) SCAM!!!

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ed4copies

ed4copies

Local Chapter Manager
Joined
Mar 25, 2005
Messages
24,757
Location
Racine, WI, USA.
Dawn just got an email from my daughter-in-law.

Seems she and my son took an "impromptu" trip to Europe (the email is specific) and they were mugged last night. My son (35) is in the hospital and she desperately needs money to pay the hotel. Their plane leaves very shortly, so please reply quickly.

The letter is very well written. Spelling and punctuation are perfect. All names are correct.

Only problem--I talked with my son last night on his way home from work, in Milwaukee. Can't get to Europe that fast.

So, I call my son's cell phone and he is at work and fine and knows that MANY of the relatives have gotten this email. ONE sent a reply and got the "follow up" requesting an immediate transfer of $2000.

We are speculating that this came from information derived from Facebook. But, my knowledge of my son's day-to-day activities made this scam fail.

Knowledge is power.

So, I hope if any of you get a similar email, realize you can CALL the person. The email says their cell phone was taken.. IF that is true, you won't get through---but certainly it's untrue if the "victim" answers his phone.

Hope this helps someone else.

It's REALLY WELL done!!

Has anyone else heard of this??
 
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always call the person...you call them, they don't call you

this has been around and yes they get the info off facebook, myspace and any other social network site

claims of being in a different country

claims person is in: the hospital, Jail ect

Never wire any money to anyone without getting hard facts.
 
I got one a couple days ago. Called the person and they were at home.
So many scammers out there.
I read yesterday where someone was emailing a person on a dating site and they sent over $200,000 to the person to 'help' them. (person said they were kidnapped, had business investments, home improvements...)
it is becoming a SAD world when we have to verify everything we read..
 
I heard of something similar, people are doing this in Jail. Some go as far as to actually contact the victim to try to steal money. Although this typically is targeted at the elderly. But still, it's crazy.
 
So, I can't call you because my cell phone was taken, but I can find a computer and write a grammatically correct and well-punctuated email begging for money. Verrrry interesting!
 
Glad to hear that everything turned out ok and that no one got dupped. This scam has actually been around for awhile. A Google search will show all sorts of similar situations that people have encountered. I agree with you, call before anything.
 
With all the scams out there. I just don't understand why anyone wires money to people anymore like this. I can understand if you are buying something like what we do from one another.
 
jeff said:
So, I can't call you because my cell phone was taken, but I can find a computer and write a grammatically correct and well-punctuated email begging for money. Verrrry interesting!
Click to expand...


The other "slight problem" was the letter said Ed (my son) was in the hospital, having attempted to fend off the attackers. HOWEVER, it also said they still had their passports and the plane was going to leave in three hours (time is of the essence).

It seemed unlikely that they could check out of a hospital and make a plane in three hours.:confused::confused::confused:
 
Ed,

I bet your son's facebook account has been hacked and his password changed.

This happened to a friend of mine about a year ago. The hacker changed her password where she could no longer access her FB account. Because she used the same password for her email, they also stole her email account.

It took her three months and some nasty letters from her husband (an attorney) to get facebook and MSN/hotmail to reset the accounts.

I am sure it help that her husband had name recognition of being in the national news at the time, but still a big PITA.

Fortunately, noone had responded to the culprit's requests. The well written emails and FB posts, while gramatically correct use profanity this particular individual would never use.

Good luck. Your son needs to check his accounts and change is passwords quickly.
 
A friend of mine had this happen and someone who got the request was duped for 2 grand. They didn't think to check into it. Very sad how some people take advantage of other's compassion and care.
 
Same thing happened to friends of mine. They had their facebook account hacked and their e-mail stolen and the same type of letter was sent to everyone on their list. The letter sounded legit becaused it used my friends names, seems like they like to hack married couples accounts. Anyway, I was told to get a seperate e-mail account just to use for facebook so this doesn't happen to me. Boy it would be a shame to get an e-mail saying Dawn was locked up in jail somewhere in Europe instead of casting blanks.

Bill
 
I got the same letter, only the people in the letter were two people I never heard of!
 
Glad they are all ok and this was not real, but if this ever happens for real and they are in Nigeria let me know. Apparently I am good friends with the king and queen.
 
To do this scam, the scammer takes control of someone's account - it could be Facebook, Myspace, some kind of webmail, or even IAP! - and uses it to contact that person's friends and family. How are they doing that? How can you make sure they don't take over one of your accounts and try to scam your friends and family?

The main way they do it for this scam is with a fake login screen. Because the internet is notoriously unreliable, we've all become conditioned to sites "forgetting" we're logged in and asking us to log in again. So they arrange for you to see a fake login screen, and you give them your data.

I'll use Facebook as an example. You're logged into Facebook, checking out your friends' updates, and you see a link that looks interesting. You click it and get a Facebook login screen. "Huh, the internet must have hiccupped" you think, and enter your login info. Then, as you expected, you continue on to see the interesting link. You are none the wiser, but you just gave the scammer your Facebook info. Soon, the scammer will log in as you, change your password (locking you out), and go to town scamming your friends and family - and also sending them the fake login screen as well.

So, on any site where you are logged in, if you unexpectedly see a login screen without having logged out, DO NOT LOGIN AGAIN right there. Instead, use a bookmark or type in the address again to go to the site's homepage (e.g. www.facebook.com). Most likely, you'll find you weren't logged out after all. And if there really was a glitch that logged you out, you can log back in safely.
 
ed4copies said:
The other "slight problem" was the letter said Ed (my son) was in the hospital, having attempted to fend off the attackers. HOWEVER, it also said they still had their passports and the plane was going to leave in three hours (time is of the essence).

It seemed unlikely that they could check out of a hospital and make a plane in three hours.:confused::confused::confused:
Click to expand...

And .. what hospital makes you STAY if you CAN'T PAY ???
Definitely not from this country..

(now, if his name was Charlie and he was traveling on a Boston subway..)
 
Ed, my emails are more generous than yours in mine if you remember that I put them up here for laugh purpose, they all say that some one loved me so much that they wanted to leave me a large sum that I will never see in my life time. I guess next time I send that link to the charities,huh?
I am glad that everything is OK with your family.
Remember back in the days you could leave the house and kiss your bride in the morning and just occasionally check in to see how things were going and everyone trusted everyone, well all of that is gone down the Nile with all that demonstrations.
 
Phil,

I like to think there are no more "bad" people than there ever were. Just the tools that we are using to communicate are new and still being "debugged". Those who abuse those tools are the "bugs" that society will, eventually, have to squash.

Right now, law enforcement could catch the person who did this and, as far as we know, he would have no penalty. So, why would they bother finding him or her??

At some point, "attempted" extortion or fraud will need to be made punishable. Then there is a deterrent effect.

Just think how much fun a perpetrator would have in prison for about 90 days. "Yeah, whadaya in fer?"
"computer identity fraud"!!:eek::eek::eek:

Oh, yeah the murderers, druggies and rapists will have a GREAT deal of fear of this thug:rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:

Could be a VERY LONG ninety days!!
 
ed4copies said:
Just think how much fun a perpetrator would have in prison for about 90 days. "Yeah, whadaya in fer?"
"computer identity fraud"!!:eek::eek::eek:

Oh, yeah the murderers, druggies and rapists will have a GREAT deal of fear of this thug:rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:

Could be a VERY LONG ninety days!!
Click to expand...

Now, real justice would be that HIS identity is stolen on the 89th day..
.. and now he can't get out.
 
Akula said:
always call the person...you call them, they don't call you

this has been around and yes they get the info off facebook, myspace and any other social network site
Click to expand...

Exactly why I don't have nor do I want a "social network" site... I guess I might be "anti social" in that respect.... I see absolutely no merit to any of these types of sites... my friends I call or email directly, I don't have a crying need to tell the world my problems, or post the latest thing I thought of, or any of that sort of stuff.... I don't have enough info on my forum sites for anyone to set up a scam...
 
Ed Jr's comments:

My son, Ed, is a programmer by profession. He asked me to post this:
(You will see it was written to all the folks effected by Sarah's Email theft, but you get the drift)

So, as many of you saw, there was a violation in my wife's account security. Here's the low down, in case any of you are ever victim.

[FONT=&quot]1.) [/FONT][FONT=&quot] Originated from Facebook. She tried to login to Facebook this afternoon and discovered her password had been changed.[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]2.) [/FONT][FONT=&quot]Using Facebook, it appears our attempted crooks were able to determine her email and also a good list of "friends" to contact. (Sorry, you all are friends, that's how and why many of you were assaulted with the email.)[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]3.) [/FONT][FONT=&quot]As is the case with me, she had her passwords synchronized. Take this as a note. Probably good to have Facebook using its very own "special" password, to avoid full breach.[/FONT]

Now, the fun part… fixing it.
First changed the password on the email account. Thankfully, I have pretty good setup with email and she's got a secondary account, so with my primary account (not breached) I was able to update her password, to get them "out" (or so I thought.. .read on.) Being somewhat computer geeky, I didn't "trust" anything. So I did call up AT&T (Internet provider) to have everything checked. They said "did you change your password?" - Yes. "Everything looks ok". So, thought things were fairly good. This was in the afternoon.

Got home, and she shared information about Facebook and acct had been breached at 3:00 this morning. The good thing about Facebook… you try to login with the old password, it alerts you to when it was changed. Anyway, I proceeded to try to fix Facebook by locking her Facebook account. Then circled back to the email, to make sure we had it "locked down" before trying to reclaim Facebook. Sent an email from my primary account, (this one) to her email to find that she wasn't receiving email. I found that disturbing, especially after talking with a few family members who had replied to the initial email. Then sent email from her account to my account. That worked. Fire up the phone, time to call AT&T back… Something seems PHISHY…..

To abbreviate a long conversation with "tech support"; summarize to say that our beloved hacker had established a POP autoforward on her account, so any email coming in to the account was being forwarded. Anyway, once that was removed, we finally got to the point that her email was the only email accepting the messages. From there, I went to Facebook where they send an email to your "registered" account to allow you to reset your password. Once reset, then you have to identify a bunch of friends by face using tagged photos (this was one of the few kind of "fun" parts of this not so fun experience.) Anyway, from there, you have to create another new password.

So, that's the last few hours summarized. I share this mostly as a service, in case you ever find yourself Facebook hijacked, this is the path to recovery.
 
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