Mario Olckers

E-Mail Scammers Ask Your Friends for Money

And now for the news at 11. A new type of online money making scam has emerged from our friends in Nigeria, it seems. This time they break into people’s webmail accounts and send emergency pleas for money to your list of contacts, claiming to have been robbed while travelling in Nigeria.

Note to all people out there who has aspirations to become a netizen, there are no rules that will protect you from stupidity and these kinds of bottom-feeders. This guy was using Yahoo, don’t the yahoos over at Yahoo.com know to protect their user’s from this type of thing.

I have been using SSL encryption to log into gmail and i feel completely safe and secure, just bookmark your homepage to https://mail.google.com and login with your details and change your password and it is A for away. It’s like internet banking secure, promise!!!

       From the New York Times article:
E-Mail Scammers Ask Your Friends for Money

By David F. Gallagher

Tags: crime, phishing, spam

Nigeria continues to develop and export the world’s most innovative Internet scams. In one bizarre variation that seems to have ramped up in recent months, the scammers are taking a page from Facebook and leveraging the power of social connections.

Here’s how it works: The scammer somehow breaks into a victim’s Web-based e-mail account. He then impersonates the victim and sends an emergency plea for help to everyone in the account’s address book, asking them to wire money to Nigeria. The e-mail includes some variation on a story about getting mugged or losing a wallet while on a trip to Nigeria.

This happened recently to Drew Biondo of Port Jefferson, N.Y. He said he was at home early one morning when his wife alerted him to an e-mail she had received from his Yahoo address about his Nigerian money troubles. He scrambled to try to regain control over his account, but trying to find a phone number for an actual human at Yahoo was “ridiculously difficult,” he said.

Mr. Biondo, a public relations executive, used the Yahoo account for work e-mail and had about 600 people in his contact list, many of them journalists. He said he soon experienced “an influx of phone calls from every reporter I’ve ever spoken to,” including some he had not heard from in years. “I credit this Nigerian scammer with one thing: he made me feel good inside because these people cared enough to drop me a phone call.”