Yesterday was a long, but very rewarding day. I drove to Manchester to do some filming for a program to be shown on prime time UK TV in January, the name of which I still can’t mention. After that we met with the owner of “an online dating efficiency hub that gives users access to […]
Month: November 2014
Refugee scams.
The refugee scam is a mix of romance scam and trunk box scam. In these cases, the “woman” will have fled the country due to her family being brutally murdered or a wicked relative trying to control her after the death of her father. They will claim to be in a refugee camp, and in […]
Misconceptions about scams.
Here we’ll list a number of misconceptions, falsehoods and lies about scammers. “All Africans are scammers” Many parts of Africa have a bad reputation as being scammer hotspots. This does not mean everyone in those places are scammers. The vast majority of people are honest and law abiding. It’s the minority that drag the reputation […]
Free email addresses.
Ask yourself this question. Do you really think the Governer of the Central Bank of Nigeria or the boss of the FBI are going to be using free email addresses? Of course they’re not. Always check to see where your reply is actually being sent to. Scammers can fake the from address, but the reply […]
Faking webcams.
With some freely available software and some prerecorded footage, scammers can appear to be someone else on webcam. There’s even a way to make the footage “interactive” if the person asks them to do the right thing. Just because they waved or blew a kiss at you when you asked, it doesn’t mean they’re real.
Retaliation – or is it?
Often we hear the scammers from West Africa claim that they’re doing these scams in retaliation for the slave trade in the past by “the white man”. Let me call bullshit on this. The scammers send out their emails en masse with no thought or care as to who receives them. They have no idea […]