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August 1, 2007

This Nigerian 419 scam brought to you by…HP!

As many people know, Nigeria is a great place to do business, especially if your business is stealing people’s bank account information.

I receive a large number of spam e-mails every day from doctors and deposed leaders who need my help to get their money out of Nigeria. Of course, all of these e-mails are simply a method of getting your banking information out of you so that they can access your accounts and go on a shopping spree, or feed their children, or maybe buy their children laptops so that they too can start the rich harvest of banking information.

I use Gmail, so usually these are correctly identified as spam and sent directly into a folder that I never bother to open. So I was surprised today to find that one had slipped through. I was even more surprised when I opened it (let’s face it, sometimes their stories are worth a chuckle) and found that the e-mail had been sent through HP’s SnapFish service.

Now, in order to understand why this was so surprising to me, you have to understand the business behind a 419 scam. First, read a 419 message to everyone you know and then ask them, “Does anyone really fall for this stuff?” EVERYONE you know will probably answer, “No way. That’s idiotic”. You would probably get the same result if you asked every person you had ever met, except maybe one. That’s how a 419 scam works, somewhere out there are some people who have never heard of this, and who genuinely believe that they can help someone out, and get rich quick in the process.

So in order for the person running the scam to get anything out of this, they are going to have to send out thousands, no, tens of thousands of emails. The fact that somehow this person managed to send out those thousands of emails using HP’s SnapFish servers does not say good things about the security or integrity of their service.

Hopefully they are already on this, and will have the hole that Dr. Isa’s email slipped through plugged up soon. For now, I’m off to see if Dr. Isa has pictures of his wife up on his SnapFish account… I hear she’s hot.

This Nigerian 419 scam brought to you by…HP! As many people know, Nigeria is a great place to do business, especially if your business is stealing people’s bank account information. I receive a large number of spam e-mails every day from doctors and deposed leaders who need my help to get their money out of Nigeria. Of course, all of these e-mails are simply a method of getting your banking information out of you so that they can access your accounts and go on a shopping spree, or feed their children, or maybe buy their children laptops so that they too can start the rich harvest of banking information. I use Gmail, so usually these are correctly identified as spam and sent directly into a folder that I never bother to open. So I was surprised today to find that one had slipped through. I was even more surprised when I opened it (let’s face it, sometimes their stories are worth a chuckle) and found that the e-mail had been sent through HP’s SnapFish service. Now, in order to understand why this was so surprising to me, you have to understand the business behind a 419 scam. First, read a 419 message to everyone you know and then ask them, “Does anyone really fall for this stuff?” EVERYONE you know will probably answer, “No way. That’s idiotic”. You would probably get the same result if you asked every person you had ever met, except maybe one. That’s how a 419 scam works, somewhere out there are some people who have never heard of this, and who genuinely believe that they can help someone out, and get rich quick in the process. So in order for the person running the scam to get anything out of this, they are going to have to send out thousands, no, tens of thousands of emails. The fact that somehow this person managed to send out those thousands of emails using HP’s SnapFish servers does not say good things about the security or integrity of their service. Hopefully they are already on this, and will have the hole that Dr. Isa’s email slipped through plugged up soon. For now, I’m off to see if Dr. Isa has pictures of his wife up on his SnapFish account… I hear she’s hot.

11 months ago