4 posts tagged “scam”

I check my Bebo account once every four or five months. I see the spammers are now heading there: I had two messages with attractive female profile pictures asking for contact. The emails were different enough but they had the same concluding paragraph along the lines of, ‘I have borrowed a friend’s Bebo account but please email me at …’
   A few clues: (a) the messages are flattering but so general they could apply to anyone; (b) why would anyone in this day and age need to borrow a Bebo account?
   I reported both to Bebo as spam but I can’t help but wonder how many got suckered in—and if these were actually from some middle-aged freak con-artist sitting in Nigeria scamming people.
   I also noticed spammers had hit the Bebo equivalent of Facebook’s “wall”—I forget what it’s called in Bebo—on my account. At least MySpace gives you the option of approving each entry, and Facebook allows you to bar your wall to anyone but your friends. No wonder so many of my friends are deserting Bebo these days, or at least they have become far less active.

As friends know, I don’t tend to like those newfangled cellphones for most things with the exception of courtship and for a few close friends, and have kept the number very private. How surprised I was to receive an SMS from Nigeria, of all places!
   Yes, folks, the 419ers have gone mobile, and they are probably going through as many random numbers as possible.
   The dumbasses are texting from +234 8074 354-611 and wrote to me on May 5 with (sic):

Congrats! Your GSM number has won u d sum of $1,300,000 on d OPEC  promo, winning no,C55T24. To claim fund, pls send us email to, opepriz@Live.com for details

Arriving at 10.22 (my phone is on GMT and I am not sure if that is local time or not).
   So be warned! Mind you, if you are online and you can read this, then you probably wouldn’t have fallen for it anyway. I believe on email alone I got around eight or nine today suggesting I am the luckiest man alive, winning all these lotteries and promotions.
   While I am sure others have received them, I lead a largely cellphone-free life that it was a surprise for me.

Since November, I have received scam emails from a company called China Net Technology Ltd. A page about the scam can be found in the comments here.
   The MO: a company finds a dot com and sends them a letter, saying that another company plans to register the same name, but for various Chinese territories (with the cn, tw and hk suffixes, among others).
   Your expected reaction: you panic and decide to negotiate with the company, because it claims it is a registry service for domain names.
   Their response: they send you a form for the domain names, at outrageous (thousands of dollars) prices.
   Initially, I was so naïve I started talking to these people. They did highlight a few domains our company planned on getting, so we registered those—but through our regular domain name registration service, paying a normal price.
   When they sent me the form, I said, ‘Forget it.’ I knew how much these names were actually worth and how they were probably phonies. Their response, sensing that the deal was about to slip through their fingers, was to say that the company wanting to register the domains was known for porn.
   By this point I didn’t really care.
   It got more suspicious as these emails kept on coming, either from another company or from the same one, but claiming yet another group was planning to register the same domains. I’ve had three more for one dot com and another for a dot org, same MO.
   Ergo: these are scammers.
   I was lucky. According to the E-consultancy page I cited, some folks even get called up by the scammers. I was fortunate that I was travelling when they first emailed me, so they never figured out where I was.
   So while you should protect your domain names, if you are interested in Chinese ones, do not get suckered in by these folks. Use your regular registry service or a respectable company.

On 3 News earlier tonight, housewife and mother Julie King was targeted by scam artists posing as working for Disney and asking for her credit card number. The caller claimed to be from Florida, but the number on her cellphone indicated she was from Red China.
   I do not believe the caller was Chinese at all. I believe, however, there are certain exchanges that may route through a Chinese service, and this includes some phone card services.
   Recently, I received a personal call from Switzerland from a similar number. While I cannot recall Mrs King’s number on her cellphone, I believe it was similar to the (00) 86 818 801-1405 number that I saw on my ID. Such a number results in a disconnected message behind the Bamboo Curtain. In my case, it was an innocent phone card number.
   I’m putting up this advisory as I cannot see the item on the 3 News website, nor can I find a feedback link. Hopefully this entry will come up in Google in due course.
   There is an easy solution: do what I do, and do not use cellphones. Or, if you must use one—Mrs King has a family, so it is reasonable that she does—do not give out the number except to your partner and your kids.