Internet-Based Scams

Phish   Malware

There are a couple of old sayings about con artists and scams: “If it looks too good to be true, it isn't true” and “You can't cheat an honest soul.” Internet con artists use tried-and-true scam tools that may be hundreds of years old, but the Internet can give them more credibility and it helps scammers hit a lot more marks than they could before. Here are two of the most common and most representative scams.

The Internet Lottery

I was so thrilled to receive an e-mail telling me that I had won the United Kingdom Internet Lottery, with a prize of 500,000 British pounds (about $1.2 million). Why, I hadn’t even entered the lottery. All I would have to do is provide my bank account information and send in $5,000 and the prize would appear in my bank account. But since I don’t have $5,000 lying around, I had to let it go.

Obviously, no legitimate contest is going to require you to pay a fee to receive your prize. The prize agency will just deduct any taxes and fees from a legitimate prize – and they won’t notify you by e-mail, either.

A dangerous variation of this scheme occurs when the victim-to-be contacts the scammers. The scammers may send what appears to be a cashier’s check for a huge sum and require the recipient to send a relatively small sum back. The "cashier’s check" bounces and the victim is suddenly “kiting” or floating checks that can’t be made good. Some marks will keep trying to collect, kiting checks for large sums that they can’t possibly cover. This is also a common feature of the Nigerian scam and it’s been implicated in at least one murder in the U.S.

The Nigerian 419 Scam

This scam is older than most of our grandparents – it actually dates back to the 1920s. I saw this one described as “help me rescue a stranded fortune” and that’s the hook. It’s called the Nigerian because Lagos, Nigeria is really the epicenter of this scam (“419” is the section of the Nigerian legal code that relates to fraud). The classic Nigerian is a fax or an e-mail that says it’s from a Nigerian government official. The official has embezzled a large sum (this is the part about not cheating an honest soul) and wants your confidential help to move it to the U.S. If you provide your bank account number, the official will move the money through your account and leave some for you. In its simplest form, the “official” just cleans out your account.

The Nigerian has many variants – I’ve seen things like “someone died with a lot of money and no will” and “I am a Christian missionary under the oppression of the Iranian mullahs” as lead-ins. The scam may say it comes from anywhere in the world and they do originate all over the globe. Some Nigerian scams get into the check-kiting method we've already looked at.

The Nigerian has a particularly dangerous “next step” in its more elaborate setups: the scammers ask the mark to come to a foreign country. Then they not only play the mark for a series of payments, each “the last one we need", but they also point out that the mark is far from home and is engaged in an illegal activity. This makes the mark vulnerable to almost anything the scammers want to do.

So what’s the answer? Spam blockers are one good tool. Scam e-mails, like phish e-mails, are all spam. A tool like SpamBayes (http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/windows.html) will help a lot. If one gets past the blocker, just delete it. If we can answer any questions or help you, please contact us.

Entré Technology Services, LLC 406.256.5700