Striking It Rich
We’ve all seen them, or at least heard about them. Some scammer sends out spam emails to every imaginable address saying he has inherited millions of dollars, but it is only accessible if it goes through a bank in the US. For your willingness to help, you’ll be given a large percentage of said inheritance. All they need is your bank account number and personal information to complete the transaction.
I always promised myself that if I was ever presented with the opportunity to have some fun with one of these scammers I would. Replying to one of those emails, though, would raise red flags with them and they’d just move on.
But yesterday, I had my chance. I’m publicly listed on Skype, and I get spam messages once in a while. Yesterday was one of those times I got a scammer sending me spam on Skype’s instant messaging service. I was promised a large sum of money if I would provide the means to transfer the inheritance.
I replied to the message asking the sender if he would call me to discuss the details and provided the phone number. He asked me if it was my mobile number, to which I replied it was a land line. He asked again would I help, and my reply was to just give me a call.
Of course, the number I provided was to the FBI headquarters in Washington, DC. Maybe next time I’ll be brave enough to have them call me directly and I can get some information to send to the FBI myself…who knows. That was enough fun for my day though.
Cool! I never thought of doing that. I always just immediately delete them. Just think if everybody did that, it might stop a lot of it. It wouldn’t stop it all, but it would stop some. I wonder how many people have been taken by these guys. A while back, there was an ad on craigslist about a free dog. It was one we wanted, so we replied. The person sent a reply back saying that they were in some foreign country as missionaries and he would have to overnight them to us. That immediately raised a red flag for us. We replied back, playing along just to see what all was involved. They wanted all of our personal information and wanted us to send a large sum of money to have them transferred to us. We got to looking and found that he had sent this same reply to dozens if not hundreds of people. Then here about 2 weeks ago, we got another message like that and saw that others had responded to it and we emailed those people and told them it was a prank and they said they were thinking the same thing and thanked us. Bunch of jerks is what they are!