Comments on: WTF?????

By: Rogerio

Rogerio — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 06:58:29 +0000

I suggest you play their game, waste their time and have a laugh at their expense. I’ve done it before, it feels good!

By: mzkagan

mzkagan — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 20:24:11 +0000

Andy & James B — you both make good points. It’s just shocking to me that ANYONE falls for this sh*t, regardless of whether they’ve seen the TV news coverage or not. It’s just… dumb. There, I said it.

By: ® Andy

® Andy — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 15:57:35 +0000

As JamesB says above … it only takes a handful to be fooled to make the effort worthwhile. It also has the advantage of being self filtering since the real effort comes later on in playing the game in an increasingly personalized way to extract the “advance fee” that these scams are anchored on. By the time they get to the point of having to send more than standard stock responses, the gullible fool has already self identified.

You’d have thought that everybody would know about these “419″ scams by now. They’re the sort of thing that have been covered on TV, or your local paper, invariable about some poor person who fell for one and lost their life savings on the promise of some huge sum. Surely anybody who spends any time on the web has read at least one 419er scam bait thread? And so to my (cheeky observation - it’s 2009 and here you are, a savvy and cool social marketing genius, commenting on the diversity and amusement of 419 spam like it’s new. They’re like so 2001 ;-). Or put another way, assuming that even connected people understand all the detailed ins-and-outs of such scams and a range of other ones is mistake, and that’s why they’ll keep coming!

Social engineering is a powerful tool, and hence the scammers and virus writers will keep trying with new twists and turns that increasingly use our own social networks to trick us. Worse still we’ll continue to occasionally fall for them!

By the way, I’ve just found what I think is a picture of you. Click this link to see if it is ….

By: JamesB

JamesB — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 14:01:48 +0000

It’s because something like 0.01% of humanity are hopelessly misguided enough to respond to these spam mails. There are supposed to be in excess of 100 billion spam messages sent every day - so several million get through to susceptible people. Of those several million there are probably a good handful who think they’re genuinely on to something and hand over bank details. And with the virtual zero cost of sending spam you probably only need one or two fish who bite the bait to make it worth while.

Your blog is brilliant by the way. An ongoing inspiration. Thanks for all you do.

It’s so good that I want to donate some money. If you can send me your bank details and credit card number and pin code, and address and date of birth then I will put $2million in to your account!