It happened after the Indian ocean tsunami and after Hurricane Katrina. It’s happening again with the earthquake in Haiti that has killed tens of thousands and left hundreds of thousands injured, homeless, hungry or without medical treatment: Scammers in Nigeria and elsewhere are stealing money meant for victims of the disaster.
If you think there [...]
Entries Tagged as '419'
Haiti disaster attracts Nigerian scammers
January 16th, 2010 · 10 Comments
Dial +44 70 (UK number) for international online fraud
November 8th, 2009 · 38 Comments
A few years ago I created the Scam-O-Matic (www.scamomatic.com), a website that every month has helped thousands of people worldwide by automatically diagnosing online fraud emails that people have submitted to it. Scamomatic.com recognizes fake lotteries, “dead customer” scams, “dying widow” scams and many other common formats from scammers from Nigeria that you may have [...]
Tags: 419 · Fraud · scams · spam
Microsoft subsidizes Nigerian scammers
February 12th, 2008 · 7 Comments
A four-part series of blog postings at Artists against 419 discusses in detail the massive abuse of Microsoft’s OfficeLive (MSOL) webhosting service by Advance fee fraud scammers, which I mentioned in a previous blog post here. Currently I come across such MSOL domains at a rate of about two new ones per day.
As the Artists [...]
Yahoo abuse handling improves, OfficeLive and Earthlink have their work cut out
December 10th, 2007 · 2 Comments
Nine months ago I reported about a series of child porn sites that were being illegally hosted at Yahoo’s webhosting service. At the time I was seeing about half a dozen new sites pop up every day. I am glad to report that about 4 weeks ago Yahoo finally seems to have done something to [...]
Anti-Fraud sites under attack
September 7th, 2007 · 3 Comments
Several of the main sites dedicated to fighting online scams are currently inaccessible because of a “Denial of service” (DoS) attack.
Fraudwatchers.com, aa419.org, 419eater.com and occassionally thescambaiter.com have been offline. Thescambaiter.com and 419eater.com are two of the oldest sites that fight “419″ scams (named of the section in the Nigerian penal code that prohibits fraud). [...]
Tags: 419 · Computers · botnets
Botnets meet “Nigerian” spam
February 28th, 2007 · 5 Comments
Today I received an email which was a familiar scam sent from West Africa. I receive literally hundreds of them every day. What made this one different was that it carried a link to a malware site.
Any Windows user foolish enough to click the link and run the executable would get his machine infected [...]