In news that will probably shock anyone who has ever met us, we’re actually not as stupid as we look. Not that this fact seems to have filtered through to the more inept internet scamsters, going by the increasing amount of emails we’re getting, all coated temptingly in fictional money. Quite often, they’ll be SO inept it’s actually funny, like this email we received earlier today.
Wow, we didn’t know British Telecom were now being run by rick-willey@sbcglobal.net! That’s a hostile takeover you’d have expected to have made the newspapers. Maybe Rick Willey is the name of the character played in the BT adverts by that bloke from My Family, and to make the corporate behemoth seem more cuddly, all business transactions are to be conducted via that email address. It all makes sense! We’re SO replying to him!
But, things get even wilier. Tonight, we received an email purporting to be from “John Nguen” of “Ralf Financial Services Pty Ltd”. The text of this email is as follows:
So, it’s a scam about asking people to transfer money via their bank accounts. Quite why the money would need to sit in someone’s account isn’t really explained (especially with UK bank transfers taking a few days to process so that the banks themselves can play with it on the overnight money markets during that time), but whoever the person behind this scam is, they’ve made more effort than your common or garden internet scam artist. The email was sent from ‘job@ralfrecruiting.org’ – they’ve gone to the trouble of registering a domain name and everything (though the WHOIS record for “ralfrecruiting.org” doesn’t give any address), and trying to visit the website itself only results in a 403 error.
