I’m sure you’ve all gotten emails telling you about your long lost, three-times-removed, incredibly rich and recently deceased uncle from _______(insert random foreign country here), or that you won the Spanish National Lottery, or some foreign business man needs someone in your area to collect his earnings for him at your local bank in exchange for a percentage?  Of course, all you have to do is send them some money to enable them to make the transaction….

Well, I always enjoy reading those emails, and if they particularly amuse me, I’ll write back amusing replies just for entertainment.   This particular one I’m about to tell you about was especially clever, as it was an advance fee fraud scam that targets escorts.  Now, I’m totally comfortable, unashamed and free of guilt for what I do, including occasionally making myself available to entertain select gentlemen at their hotel suites when they’re visiting Toronto.  You see, in Toronto, outcall escorting is 100% legal.  Thank goodness the government here is smart enough to realize that what two consenting adults do behind closed doors, so long as they aren’t hurting anyone, is between them.  Of course soliciting for the purposes of, procuring, pimping, etc, are illegal, but this blog entry is not to discuss legalities of or personal opinions about escorting.  It’s about this scam I wanted to share.  The reason I brought up escorting, like I said, was because this scam targets escorts, and escorting is not legal in all places of the world, so these girls are an ‘easy target’ so to speak, as they are unable to go to the authorities without outing themselves, should they get scammed.

The statistics on these scams are astounding! RCMP statistics show that between the years 2004-2006, the reported dollar loss on internet/email fraud alone is over $2,800,000.00, and thats not counting telephone scams, mail, print, etc.  That’s a lot of money! I would think that with the latest ’sport’ of scambaiting or scambusting (some of which is totally hilarious! I’ll post some examples & links below), better spam filters for our email and a general heightened awareness, that the dollar amount for recent years would be lower, but I don’t have stats on that at the moment.

Now, let’s move on to the scam that this piece of ‘merde’ tried to pull on me.   Last week I get an email from a guy who said he’d be in town next week and was interested in my company for an entire night, for the 4 nights of his stay.  Not an overly unusual request, but for someone I’d never met before, red flags went up.  First of all, this would be a ridiculously expensive visit, if he did indeed want my company for the amount of time he requested.  Secondly, most men (I presume) would like to get to know a girl they’re going to spend this kind of money on a bit better before committing to this arrangement.  Personally, I won’t see anyone for an engagement this long unless they are a well-established client, and I know I can trust them *AND* get along with them well enough to handle that much time together – because let’s face it: a hot fantasy evening is one thing, but 4 full evenings and overnights is another, especially with a stranger!

Anyway, so I decide to reply to see if I can get any sense of this guy’s character with further email, as the first email was only 2 sentences long. …well, if you could even call this sentence structure:

So I write back and tell him my rates, and I also inform him that I do not book dates for longer than 4 hours with someone I have not previously met, and ask him what he has in mind.  I get this as a reply the next day:

Clearly this guy is having a little difficulty communicating with me, so I decided to be as explicitly precise as I can, to affirm my suspicions, that this guy is a scammer.  (Though, I do have to admit, a part of me was hoping he wasn’t, because 4 nights of being entertained and hanging out with a cool guy for a great amount of money would be nice, but as they say, “If it seems to good to be true, it probably is!”   They’re often right… whoever they are!

So I write:  If I understand what you’re looking for, you are looking for 28 hours of my time, (note: I discuss my rate here, though I see no need to bring it up now),  Presupposing you are hoping for a lower total than that, AND presupposing that we meet up & enjoy eachother enough on the first meeting (beginning this Sunday, the 24th) just what did you have in mind?

Are you looking for me to come join you at your hotel each night at 10 pm, and then leave each morning at 5:am when you do?  Are you expecting to sleep at all during this time? Should I be expecting to get any sleep?  Please tell me what you are thinking, and how much you are hoping to spend?

Days go by with no response, and then I get a simple “Hello babe are you there?” email.  So the next day, early Sunday morning, sometime around 2:30 in the morning I decide to write back, as it’s beginning to get really entertaining for me, and I want to see just how far he’ll let this deception go.  I write to him very sweetly, asking him if he’s still coming to town that night, and asked him to get in touch with me at my cellular number.  A few hours go by and I get this:

Okay, I think, let’s keep going and see where this goes.  I mostly want to know what sort of scam he’s planning.  I know that something is up, but I’m not sure the exact logistics of his plan… yet.  I write back and tell him that I want to start with 4 hours to see how we get along first, and take it from there.  Without even acknowledging my proposal of a ‘trial run’ he asks for my paypal information so he can send the money for the 2 days.  Without my replying, he sends an email to the same address we’ve been corresponding through with this amusing, and clever email.  This one is too big for me to post in it’s original size, so please click on the small image to view the enlarged version.

So now I get this email from “Williams” on behalf of ‘PayPal’, but in actuality it’s just an email address he’s made through an anonymous mail server.   He sends this ‘transaction’ to me, and for the life of me, I can’t figure out where he got that number from, as it doesn’t represent any of the rates I quoted him for the different time slots we discussed.  On top of that, he’s introduced this new character, Robert Johnson, who is to be a recipient of $700 Australian dollars, but sent to his address in The United Kingdom.  To someone who has no experience with paypal transactions, this might seem legitimate.  The promise of a large sum of money being deposited into their account (which is supposed to include compensation for the money needed to be sent to this ‘agent’) could be very tempting for someone who might already be under financial strain, and/or who might not able to report transgressions against them in fear of being arrested and charged with prostitution.  Very clever, Williams, but not clever enough.  You got sloppy here.  Let’s re-examine this ‘paypal’ email a little further, shall we?

First of all, while the scammer went to the trouble of making an email with the graphics he ripped from paypal, the email address it’s actually coming from is this ‘williams’ email.  It states on behalf of paypal, but even that address isn’t paypal, it’s from an email address created at a free mail server.  In this case @consultant.com, which is a subset of mail.com.  Second of all, the amounts, (which we’ve already determined to be a random #, not actually related to me – my guess is most likely he just copied and pasted this email that was used to scam many other people), are inconsistent and undefined.  We have amounts of $7,550.00,  $6,850.00, and $700.00 but in unspecified currencies.  Have you ever dealt with PayPal where they didn’t specify USD, CAD, GBP or which ever currency the transaction was in? Me neither.  Not only that, but first we have undefined dollars, then 700 of these dollars is extracted, and further down it’s pointed out to be Australian dollars, yet the recipient is in the UK and wants Western Union to send it to there.

Now here’s another blatant flaw… why on earth would PayPal need you to use a third-party financial service (in this case Western Union), in order to complete a transaction?  Right.  They wouldn’t.  It’s absurd to think that paypal would take part in a transaction as sloppy as this, and so far I’ve only gone halfway through this email.  The list goes on, but I’ll spare you of examining the rest of the flaws.  I will point out that all of the links to ‘paypal’ lead to a fake paypal site hosted at some fake free hosted website, or they didn’t work at all.  Also notice that the email specifies that any customer care inquiries should be made to this personal email address, and NOT to paypal at all!  Sheesh! The icing on the cake is the clearly cut & pasted copyright notice, where the incompatible ascii characters are included, as well they parse paypal as Pa yPal Company!

This is just too funny, I’m laughing out loud, and I have to get my roommates to show them this hilarious attempt at a scam.  So I reply, seeing just how far ‘Williams’ or ‘Robert’ or whoever this guy is claiming to be, will take it.  I also want to see how high I can get his hopes, because wasting his time means less time he has to spend on scamming someone else, someone who may not know it’s a scam and fall victim to it.   I then notice I have this email waiting for me in my inbox:

Okay ‘Williams,’ it looks like you really think this scam is working on me, though you didn’t specify Australian dollars in this email, and what is this about your number in the UK?  Do you really think I’m going to call overseas on my dime to talk to you?  Or have you confused your scams, and think that I am in the UK, and you will be visiting me here?  Anyway… I don’t reply.  I want to make him feel a little nervous.  The next day I get this little gem:

So now it’s time to tease the guy.  Make him think he’s not only getting his scam money, but also that this totally hot pornstar wants to fuck him.  I write this: (and I also included an XXX rated photo of me, just to be a tease!)

He replies with more BS excuses with this message:

So now ‘you’ has become ‘we’ and he believes he will definitely call me?  It’s like sex panther cologne. 60% of the time, it works everytime!  At this point, ‘williams’ didn’t seem to be affected by my photo, and his replies are getting tedious and repetitive, so I get bored and stop replying.  He writes back the next day with ‘Are you there?’ and that’s the last I heard of him.  I’ve been considering writing back now to see if I can re-ignite his interest, and see if I can waste some more of his time, if it would be amusing enough.  Send me your suggestions of what you’d write if it were up to you, k?  I’ll use the best one or a combination of the best ones and post an update here when I get a reply.  This will be fun!

So after this, I decided to investigate and see if there was any point reporting this guy to the authorities, and since I didn’t actually take a loss, there really wouldn’t be much of a point in an investigation on this guy.  The advice I got was just to delete any emails I get from scammers, and save myself the headache.  That wouldn’t be much fun, now would it?  Like I mentioned earlier, there are many people who have taken to the sport of ’scambaiting’ and some of these stories are so funny.  These guys get scammers to send pictures of themselves wearing buckets on their heads, getting actual tattoos, even going so far as to get them to pay for shipping from US to Nigeria of huge, heavy items like washers and dryers! Here’s a clip that one scammer was baited into making for ‘AnusLaptops’ – the whole hilarious story can be found here: TheScamBaiter Website

My current favorite scambaiting story is of a scammer that was scammed into creating a wooden replica of a commodore 64 keyboard!

Being a nostalgic geek, I remember my commodore 64, and that clunky cassete-disk drive, then came those giant (literally floppy) disks.  The original blue screen… ah, the memories.  Anyway, check out THIS ARTICLE that talks about 5 particularly interesting scambaits.

So now I’ll leave you to think of some smart and funny things I could write back to ‘williams’ – let’s see what we can come up with?

xo Violet

p.s. I’m sorry if there are spelling/grammar mistakes in this blog entry (aside from the scammer’s email) as it’s taken a long time for me to put this together and I’m too tired to go through it and check. Forgive me? =)

Tags: 419, advance fee fraud, commodore 64, scam, scambaiting

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