Ways to spot a scammer. With example.

[Wayne]

I was asked to explain the ways we put together the proof that someone's a scammer This is a slightly edited version of my reply that I think people will find useful:

We'll use viewtopic.php?f=11&t=269 for this one.

Let's start with the email address. West African scammers have a certain style they use for their usernames and email addresses that are easy to spot. Last name, first name. So we immediately have a red flag with the email address.

Next we'd use http://images.google.com/ to search the pictures. Simply using a photo of someone else isn't proof it's a scammer, but if there are other reports of scammers then the odds are it's a scammer too. In this case we've identified the real owner of the photos as Richard Herdman. You can see his details at http://www.vidics.ch/People/RichardHerdman-7517248.html

Almost immediately after, we see this:

Ethnicity African American

Common mistake. They also confuse Native American with American.

If you Google the first sentence of his description, you get over 94,000 hits. Coincidence? http://www.waydate.com/profile.php?ID=35626 has another scammer using it with photos of Ann Angel as another example. Jump to the last sentence of the second paragraph and you get 119,000 hits. See where this is going?

So now we reach the 3rd paragraph and this reeks of scammer. See how the language completely changes from the first two? "Am martins cole" has the typical "am" instead of "I am", plus the misspelling of California we see very often. He also says "I will like", which is another thing we see all the time from a West African scammer. They use "will" instead of "would". If he'd have said "Am the only child of my parents" we'd have had the full set!

We also see Manchester, which for some reason is one of the favourite places for a scammer claiming to be in the UK to say he's at along with London and Liverpool. At this point there's absolutely no doubt he's a scammer, but there's still more evidence to be found. The +(44)70 number is a redirect commonly used by scammers. It's an internet "Follow me" number that they can answer anywhere in the world and costs an absolute fortune to call. In fact, Skype won't let you call it for that reason. People have been known to lose more from the phone calls than to the scammer himself.

In this instance, Firefly's detective work even found the real person behind the account and he's exactly what we would have expected from the clues. The IP address also led us to Nigeria with this one. When all the pieces of the jigsaw are put together, you can see the proof the person is a scammer even before the money request comes.