Blog archive.

[Wayne]

DDoS attacks


We’ve had several DDoS attacks lately. Luckily they haven’t taken our site down, but we do have very good DDoS protected hosting. It’s more expensive, but as we can see, it’s well worth the cost. Crazy as it sounds, we actually like getting them. It shows us that we’ve upset someone enough for them to be willing to pay to try and shut us down. For those unaware, a DDoS attack is when hundreds, thousands, or even millions of infected computers are all told to go to a specific site. The result is that the host can’t cope with all the traffic and it shuts the site down. The first time it ever happened to us was back in August of 2012, just a few months after we started. These days, we probably get one a fortnight. It’s going to take more than that to stop us reporting the scammers.

[Wayne]

If it can be used, it can be abused.


Scammers will use anything they can to make their scams appear more legitimate. This includes abusing many legitimate services. For example, Western Union offer a service where people can be sent money if they lose their ID/get robbed. To do so, the person sending the money gives the person collecting the money a test question and answer. Have the MTCN (basically the transaction number) and the right question and answer and you can collect the money without the need for ID. Scammers use this as a way to collect money from their victims without having to give their real details. Internet “follow me” numbers are great, as you can give a person a number and they can reach you on it no matter where in the world you are. Scammers of course use these to appear in another country, typically using the +4470 number. Screen recording software is incredibly useful for making captures showing how things are done on a computer without having to resort to long lists explaining each step. Unfortunately it’s also incredibly useful for blackmail scammers to record the webcam of a person in a compromising situation. There was even a time (though we don’t see it much anymore) where scammers would use text phones – designed to help people without the ability to speak – as a way to disguise their voice. So remember, if there’s a way to abuse a legitimate service or product, scammers will find it.

[Wayne]

Pot, kettle, black.


Remember that this comes from a scammer profile:

A note to all online Cheater ,Joker, and boys who derive pleasure from reeling women in building up false hope then crushing them ,you know who you are…am not here for you, you’re not welcome.

This is actually a common scammer trick to warn off other scammers. Also it’s worth knowing how we can tell this is a scammer profile just from that short extract. No one else uses the word “joker”. It’s actually a term they use for baiters. It comes from “Gmail jokers” from back in the days when all baiters would use Gmail. Plus the “am not here” part has that typical West African thing of saying “am” instead of “I am”.

[Wayne]

Does this make sense to you, because it doesn’t to me.


This “company” wants you to pay the delivery and insurance fees, rather than have the person who sent it pay them. If this were a real world scenario and not some made up nonsense by a scammer, would any company ask for insurance fees from the person receiving the goods, rather than the person sending them? It would be like the postal service accepting a letter without a stamp from me, then refusing to deliver it unless the person it was intended for bought a stamp. Sheer nonsense. If you could do that, I’d be sure to post a brick every day to someone I hate every day for the rest of their life and have them pay for them.

Note that we have been instructed not to deliver your package to you
without receiving the Delivery and Insurance fee from you. Also we can
not take the risk of delivering your package to you without insuring
it because we can not afford to pay for any lost or damage in the
process of delivering your package to you, try and understand the
situation at hand.

[Wayne]

Everyone’s a scammer but me, I swear.


This is a typical line from a scammer email:

NOTE: IF ANY BODY CALL YOU OR SEND EMAIL TO YOU LOOK AT IT VERY WELL AS I DIRECTED YOU TO AVOID THOSE HOODLUMS NOT TO CONFUSE YOU.

Basically, they don’t want you talking to any other scammer. After all, if you send that scammer money, you won’t have any to send them. We’ve even seen scammers put a list of “scammers” in their email, which are all names of real people scammers pretend to be. They don’t like competition over there. I mean, how dare another scammer get to their “rightful” money before they can?

[Wayne]

One ring scams.


This is a particularly clever scam that doesn’t even need any human interaction. Here’s how it works. Your phone rings once, then hangs up. When you check your last call, it gives a number you don’t recognise, so you call it. At this point you’ve just connected to a premium rate number and being charged through the nose as you put up with some godawful muzak while you wait to speak to someone or listen to a prerecorded message. Every second that you’re on the line, the scammers are making money from you, and you won’t know about it until your next bill. All the scammers need is an autodialer and a premium rate number.

[Wayne]

Why do we do this?


I was recently asked as part of a TV interview why I do this. It’s not as if we get paid for it, yet we give up hours of our time each and every day to help others who’ve been scammed. I’m sure I speak for all the volunteers on the site when I say that my answer was “because it’s the right thing to do”. Why should we let the scammers get away with ruining lives simply because they want quick and easy money and don’t care what the consequences are. We help people, but we also give them the tools and the knowledge to help themselves. By getting the scammer details posted, people can save themselves before they get sucked into the scam. We’re never going to eliminate scams, but we can make people aware of them and prevent them from getting scammed. Firefly and I went to Germany to speak to the dating site industry at the iDate conference in September. We didn’t have a company credit card to pay for those hotel rooms or to cover the travelling expenses. All that came out of our own pockets. Yet we still did it. And we do it for the same reason our small group of volunteers give up their free time each and every day. Because we’ve seen the damage scammers can do to people. Because we know that the scammers are never going to stop. Because it’s the right thing to do.

[Wayne]

What’s God got to do with it?


Many scammers claim to be religious. Many seem to got to church. We’ve even seen the test questions and answers the scammers use have terms like “Question – God. Answer – is great”. Yet, they seem to conveniently forget the whole “Thou shalt not steal” bit in the Bible. Let me try to explain the strange way that scammers can claim to be religious while stealing every penny a person has. Here’s what we’ve been told. Scammers do indeed to go church. They pray (and boy, can they pray if you give them a chance!) and they’re perfectly happy to sing a few hymns with a little prompting. But – and here’s where it gets strange – they believe that if God gives them a “good paying maga”, then he’s blessing them. Basically, they believe that if God didn’t want them to scam, then He wouldn’t give them people to scam. So their belief is “Thou shalt not steal. Unless you can get away with it, then it’s fine”. I must have been off ill the week they discussed that amendment to the 10 commandments in Sunday School.

[Wayne]

t’s not just about the money, even if it is to the scammers.


Yes, scams cost people money. Online scams are estimated to cost people over $110 billion dollars a year. That’s a lot of money by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s not the whole story. blackmail scams/sextortion for example, leave people in a perpetual state of fear. People have taken their own lives because of it. Romance scams steal a person’s self worth and trust in others. People have ended up homeless. They’ve even been jailed after cashing a fake cheque sent to them by the scammer. Being scammed can lead to people being hit with another scam, called a recovery scam. Just as they have no more to give, the scammer comes back as another person claiming they can get their money back for a fee. Where do they go for this money they don’t have? Sell the car? Sell the house? Steal from family members? Go to a loan shark? It’s not just money a person loses. They can lose everything, including their life.

[Wayne]

What do the scammers look like? A lot less good looking than the photos they steal.


http://scamsurvivors.com/forum/viewtopi ... =21&t=1861 has an entire rogues’ gallery of real scammer photos. Check it out if you want to see what the person talking to you REALLY looks like. We call them “Mug(u) shots”. Here’s why. Scammers refer to their victims as magas. It means “fool”. If they want to insult you, then they’ll call you a mugu. That means “big fool”. So “mug(u) shots” is a play on “mugu” and “mug shots”.