Dear Beneficiary

I often post scam emails that I get, but this one came to a friend and I saw it show up at his virtual home on Facebook. Posting it here just as a reference in case anyone gets something similar and wonders if it’s real.

It’s not. It’s a scam. Don’t answer. Serously. You could lose every penny you have.

Dear Beneficiary,

I hope that this correspondence is received with the urgency and expediency required.It has come to the notice of the Board of Trustees of the Federal Reserve Bank here in Washington, D.C. that your present inheritance claims application being handled by the Remitting Bank in Nigeria is experiencing some man made irregularities. To this effect, it has become necessary for the Board of Trustees to assign trained Fund Transfer Specialists from the United States to resolve and regularize your fund release with immediate effect.

We at Deborah L. Hayes & Corporate Affairs have been duly consulted by the FRB Board of Trustees. We have been fully informed about how the staffs of the remitting bank has been taking advantage of you by telling you to pay unnecessarily exorbitant charges which will only make your fund payment a long drawn out process.
Due to this development, we have been assigned to step into the immediate processing of your fund transfer to enable your funds to be transferred to you within the shortest possible time. To implement this, you are to get back to us immediately without needing to pay all the huge sums of monies that are being demanded from you by the previous handlers at the remitting bank.
All processes to have your funds paid to you immediately through the CBN’s Liaison Remittance Office in New York have been initiated to cut out unnecessary costs.
You are advised to treat this communication with the urgency and seriousness required as the Board of Trustees of the Federal Reserve Bank has mandated us to resolve this fund payment within the next three working days independent of the office of the Remitting Bank in Africa.

Furthermore,you are hereby advised to pay no further fees or charges to the Remitting Bank in Nigeria as they shall no longer be handling your payment process.
We shall await your immediate correspondence with your direct telephone numbers to my private email address at (deborahhayes11111@gmail.com) for re-confirmation so that we may conclude your payment immediately.
Yours Sincerely,
Deborah L. Hayes
Senior Vice President of Corporate Affairs

It surprises me that scam emails of this nature continue to be a thing. The only reason they continue is that they must, somehow, inexplicably, be profitable. I guess if there are people stupid and evil enough to make a living this way, there must be people stupid and gullible enough to send them money. But if posting things like this can save even one person from being taken advantage of, the effort is worth it.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Nigerian Scammers Still At It in 2018

Received in my spam folder just today, but I’m astonished that the stupid and the criminal are still trying these tired old campaigns, hoping to ensnare the foolish or the desperate. Be careful out there.

Image result for nigerian scammer

The bad English [as soonest as you contacts her] is a dead giveaway. Talking about money (that doesn’t exist) is a dead giveaway. Never respond to solicitations like this. There is no “Chashier’s Cheque” waiting for you. Ever.

Av.Bernardino Caballero.
Casi Piribebuy Bo San Pablo .
Presidente Franco.
Tel: 00595-61-572263
Fax: 00595-61-574599.
PARAGUAY.

Dear Good Friend,

How are you doing today, I hope you haven’t forgotten me? I am Dr. Youssef Bakary, the former manager at the Bank of Africa (B.O.A) Bank in Ouagadougou Burkina Faso over there in West Africa, who has contacted you some time ago to assist me in order to secure the release of a deceased customer’s fund into your bank account.

Though, you weren’t able to assist me up to the conclusion stage in that transaction by then, I am very much happy to inform you about my success in getting the fund transferred under the assistance and co-operation of a new partner from Paraguay.

Presently, I am in Paraguay for investment projects with my share of the total sum.

Meanwhile, I didn’t forget your past efforts, and attempts to assist me on the transferring of the fund, and I makes sure that you aren’t left behind or out from the benefits of the transaction. Hence, I have kept aside for you the total sum of: $1,675,000.00 (One Million Six hundred, and seventy-five thousand, Usa-dollars) in the ‘CHASHIER’S CHEQUE’.

My new partner and I have agreed to compensate you with that above said amount for all your past efforts and attempt to assist me in that past successful matters. I have appreciated your kind efforts at that time very much, so feel very free to contact the bank’s secretary via her below email address, and the name of the secretary of the (B.O.A) is MRS. CAROLINA ILBOUDOU.

And make sure that you instructed her on how to send the ‘CHASHIER’S CHEQUE’ to you, and please do let me know immediately you receives the ‘CHASHIER’S CHEQUE’ so that we can share the joy together after all the stress at the past times.

At the moment, am very busy here in Paraguay because of the investment projects of which my partner and I were having at hands presently, and finally remember that I had left an instruction to the secretary of the (B.O.A) MRS. CAROLINA ILBOUDOU.

Therefore, as soonest as you contacts her for the said ‘CHASHIER’S CHEQUE’ to be sent to you, she will surely send the ‘CHASHIER’S CHEQUE’ to you. Below is the contact of the secretary of the (B.O.A) Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso over there in West Africa .

Contact this below person immediately for your cheque:-

MRS. CAROLINA ILBOUDOU.
Secretary of the (B.O.A),
Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.
Email Address: (caro.ilboudouu@outlook.fr )

Yours good friend,
Dr. Youssef Bakary.

Edit 7/18/2017 – I thought I’d tweak these cretins a bit.

I responded in my usual manner:

Dem no born u reach, onioburu. U no fit comot face, just skip along. Mugu no chop my dollar, chop only black powder and death from Olumba Olumba Obu.

If you’re not up on Nigerian pidgin, this says, in effect, “Don’t even think about it, you gong-farmer. You’re not worthy of showing up in public, away with you. You fool, you won’t get my money – you’ll only get cursed by Olumba Olumba Obu.” (Obu was the founder of The Brotherhood of the Cross and Star (BCS), a religious organisation in Nigeria. Obu was believed to have miraculous powers.)

And hilariously, I got a response – clearly the scammers don’t even bother to read any return messages they receive.

Attention: 

Thank you for your prompt mail been received by me, and also as you have contacted me for your confirmable bank Cheque of $1.675,000.00 United States dollars only. I was in our bank’s reconciliation department with the Cheque to confirm if the Cheque has expired or getting near to the date of expiration, and Mrs. Mary Ouattara, the directress of the reconciliation department of our bank here told me that before the Cheque will get to your hand that it will expire as I don’t actually know the exact day and when you will contact me for your confirmable bank Cheque, because it has been more than two weeks which your partner left the Cheque with me.


Therefore, I quickly told Mrs. Mary Ouattara, the directress of the reconciliation department of our bank to cash the $
1.675,000.00 united states dollars, and she has converted it into a cash payment since one week now and this is to avoid losing this fund under expiration of the Cheque as your ex-partner who dropped the Cheque has travelled for business trip, and might not return back here again as he said, and according to my personal decision, I decided to send the cash payment to you through dhl courier company in a consignment packaged as an African Clothes box because I cannot keep those funds with me to avoid any suspicious from my Bank.  

What you have to do right now is to contact the dhl courier company as soon as possible to know when they will deliver your consignment to you, but make sure you did not disclose the content to dhl because I told dhl that the content is African Clothes.


You have to quickly contact the dhl courier company with your home address and telephone number for the delivery of your consignment to your door step, but do not allow DHL Company to discover those funds in your consignment because I registered your consignment as African Clothes’ content.


HERE IS THE DHL COURIER COMPANY CONTACTS

The Dhl Office Manager’s Name:  Josaine Sawadogo Zagre.
The Dhl Office Of The Manager’s Telephone Number:  +226 74 85 38 20.

The Dhl Customer’s Service Telephone Number +226 50 311947 or +226 50 335171.

The Dhl Courier Company’s Customer care Email Address: 
servicedhlbfouaga@gmail.com 
The Dhl Courier Company’s Web-Site:  
www.dhl.com/en/bf/country_profile.html

Note this is very clearly, the dhl courier company does not know the content of the box, I have registered it as a box of African Clothes, they don’t know that the content is money, and this is to avoid them delaying with the box from delivering.

Make sure that you follow up these above instructions carefully in order to get your package (your fund) delivered at your door step in your country.


Congratulations!!!. Good luck as well. Contact the dhl courier service company right now for your consignment (your fund).


I will send to you in my next email your consignment’s Certificate of Deposit which I received from DHL Burkina Faso on the day which I deposited your consignment in their custody.   


Contact them right now!!!


My best regards,

Mrs. Carolina Ilboudou.

Secretary of the Bank.

I wrote to the indicated address, saying “I am supposed to contact you regarding the consignment of a box.” I’ll report back if anyone responds.

Be very careful out there.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

No, I didn’t ask to cancel my Gmail account

Scammers

Subject: Request to Terminate Your account has been accepted
From: AccountUpdate qAvmWq4@zbikfv.uk via physics.metu.edu.tr
Date: Apr 26 (10 days ago)
to _To: millions of people

Dear Gmail Customer,

You submitted a request to terminate your Gmail mail account and the process has started by our Gmail mail Team, Please give us 3 working days to close your mail account.

To cancel the termination request reply to this mail.

All files on your Gmail mail including (Inbox, Sent, Spam, Trash, Draft) will be deleted and access to your Gmail mail account will be Denied.

If you wish to Terminate your Email Address, you can Sign Up for a new Gmail mail account.

For further help please contact by replying to this mail.

Regards,
Gmail! Account Services

Please watch out for emails like this. No, I didn’t ask for my Gmail account to be terminated, and neither did you.

If you respond to the email, you will be confirming that you are a live sucker to these people:

reply@positndor.net,
replyme@pinewbrokers.net,
reply@raintrature.com,
hello@cestaticket.com.ve,
peru@minedu.gob.pe,
marco@geturoffrsnw.win,
admin@betterwithfn.com,
comm@edukouvola.fi,
notice@myegy.com

And it’s a penny to a quid that every one of them is a scammer who will do their best to get your personal information or your money.

How do you know this message is not from Gmail? It was sent from The Gmail! account team (Gmail doesn’t use a “!” in their name like “Yahoo!” does. In addition to that, the return address is:

AccountUpdate qAvmWq4@zbikfv.uk via physics.metu.edu.tr

A double redirect, one from the UK and one from Turkey. No, Virginia, that’s not Gmail.

Be careful out there.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Don’t fall for spam solicitations

Typical scam hook letter, looking for easy marks. They don’t ask for money up front, just offer to give their “wealth” away. People who respond will be asked for “fees” and “taxes” and “bribes.”

Just don’t.

Mary James <jamesm@cantv.net
1:47 PM (2 hours ago)
to Recipients

My name is Mary James. am 75 yrs old of age and I stay in New York City, New York USA. I am a good merchant, I have several industrial companies and good share in various banks in the world.

I spend all my life on investment and corporate business. Along the way I lost my husband and two beautiful kids in a fatal accident that occurred in November 2003. Ever since I lost my family, its been difficult to sleep or get enough rest. Later in the year 2004 February I was sent a diagnosis letter after a medical check up, confirming from my personal doctor that I have lung cancer, which can easily end my life at anytime.

I found it uneasy to survive myself, because a lot of investment cannot be run and manage by me again. I quickly call up a pastor/prophet to give me positive thinking on this solution as my adviser. He minister to me to share my properties ,wealth, to motherless baby/orphanage homes/people that need money for survivor both student that need money for schooling, business woman and man for their investment and for future rising.So therefore I am writing this letter to people who are really in need of help from me both student in college to contact me urgently, so that I can make an available preparation on that.

I also have a good loan master agent that I have discuss with to release free loan offer to you which you don’t need to pay the loan back,cos it’s a free loan master offer. Especially women of the day, who are divorced by their husband, who cannot survive the mist of feeding their self, please contact me and stop weeping.

Probably let me know what you really need the money for and if you can still help me to distribute money to nearest orphanage homes near your town. May the lord bless you as you reach me, please to remind you, don’t belongs to scammers or any act of fraudulent on Internet.

Best Regards,
Mrs. Mary James.

Be careful out there.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Domain Listings: Another Scam

For a while now, people have been receiving deceptive solicitations from a company called “Domain LIstings, PO Box 19607, Las Vegas, NV 89132-0607.” I got one just last week.

You can see the letter they send out below:

domain1domain2

The letter is designed to think that you have to pay to re-register your domain, but this outfit is nothing more than an American version of the “World Business List” – offering worthless services for an outrageous fee.

Please note that these bottom-feeders offer you virtually nothing that Google doesn’t do for free. Their “directory” will not give you a whit of exposure. They offer 24/7/365 exposure, which is exactly what you get when Google and the other search engines crawl your site.

Customer reviews at Yelp, just as an example.

If you get one of these letters, it’s not an invoice. Just throw it away, and stay away from these scum-eaters.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Yahoo Mail “Upgrade” scam

Found this in my mailbox just today, although it arrived last week.

Scam

The “Upgrade Now” link leads to “https://ravenbiotech.com/oluwamide/yahoo/image.htm,&#8221; but the link is now dead. Raven Biotech is a legitimate firm, but some scumbag somewhere managed to get onto their server and add the malicious page – probably designed as a phishing scam or drive-by malware downloading.

Never click on links in emails. Notice where the link goes by hovering your mouse over the link, and then visit the page directly.

If you’re not sure an email is valid, contact the company by phone.

Never provide sensitive banking, financial, or password information on the internet if you don’t know who you are dealing with. Be careful out there.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Never call 888-710-4402

If your computer running Chrome suddenly locks up and you get these display screens:

Scam1

Scam2do NOT under any circumstances call the number shown (888-710-4402). You’ll be connected to scammers in India who will tell you all sorts of incomprehensible things about your machine and ask you to let them connect with your computer.

Look at how bad the English is – practically incomprehensible. This is NOT the number for Microsoft Technical Support. These folks are liars, criminals, and all-round Very Bad People. Allow these drones to access your machine and you’re likely to end up with all your files encrypted by ransomware, or have your machine turned into part of a spamming robot network, or have your financial data stolen, or something equally insidious.

Kill Chrome using the Task Manager and re-launch. These exploits are usually encountered when malicious code is run from an ad somewhere on a page you visited, and is usually not the fault of the page itself.

Be safe out there.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

The scammers don’t give up

scam1

The “Microsoft Customer Support” scam: Today’s number is 866-587-7384.

Your screen locks up. You can’t close your browser. You can’t go back. A computerized voice starts talking to you about pornographic malware. A warning message tells you your data is being stolen. You are given a phone number to call for help removing the malware.

Do NOT call this number. It has nothing to do with Microsoft. The page you are seeing is a malicious script that has been loaded from a website that you visited, probably from a banner ad or something else that the page owner is unaware of, and is designed to scare you. If you follow the steps the “support agent” gives you, he or she will have you  give them total control of your system. From there, anything can happen and none of it will be good.

In the event that you went through this process with an “agent,” it will be critical for you to run an anti-malware program such as Malwarebytes (I don’t work for them), or have your computer cleaned by a professional, before you do anything else.

Be careful out there.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Don’t reply to spam. Ever.

This should go without saying, but I just thought I’d point out one of many reasons why you should never respond to spam messages.

spam

(We wanted to let you know that we noticed that you still did not claim your $200 Amazon-shopping bonus that was gifted to you as a thank you for your business in past.
Please be sure to claim this before Aug 25
But Hurry! This Ends on Aug 25!
Please Go Here Now to Claim Your $200 Amazon-Shopping Bonus)

Click on the “Claim Your Bonus” link and your email program will generate a message to the following addresses:

  • info@delopment.net
  • sports@southeoffice.com,
  • mailtech@provintimate.net
  • reply@republck.com
  • info@templervices.net

Whatever message you send, such as “Ooh yes I want my bonus” or whatever, you have just given a live email address to five spammers/criminals/scammers or Mogg knows what, with a loud additional shout: “I am a sucker! Please Scam Me!”

Just don’t. Never respond to anything in your Spam box, and if you get email from people you have never done business with, delete it at once.

Be careful out there.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Hard Drive Safety Delete Will Start in Five Minutes

Executive Summary: There is no “hard drive safety delete.” Your machine is not infected. You have been redirected to a malicious web page. Calling “support” will connect you to someone in India who wants to install malware on your computer. Don’t do it.

deleteDelete 2

Just posting this with a sample screen so that anyone who searches for the Zeus virus infection might see it.

A full description of this scam can be found at a previous entry.

Do NOT call 844-813-1552 to ask for support. Be very careful out there.

The Old Wolf has spoken.