Scam email I received thru PCA email address

[MR LIPP]

Hi,Dear,

From Rose kone
Abidjan - Cote d.Ivoire

My Respect Dearest one,

It is my pleasure to contact you for a business venture which I intend to
establish in your country. Through I have not met with you before but I
believe, one has to risk confiding in someone to succeed sometimes in
life. There is this amount of $16.5Million United States Dollar. which my
late father deposited with a bank here in Abidjan cote D'ivoire .

which he wanted to used for his political reason in our Country before he
was assassinated. Now I have decided to invest these money in your country
or any where safe enough outside our country for security and political
reasons. i want you to send me your bank detals were this fund will be
transferd into so that as soon as the money gets to your account i will be
coming over to your country to finish my education and also the investment
of the money while you will be the maneger of the investment untill i
finish my education.

I will like to invest part of the money into these three investment in
your Country but, if there is any other business that is better than what
I am suggestion, I will be very glad to follow your advice.

1). Real estate
2). The transport industry
3). Five star hotel

If you can be of an assistance to me i will be pleased to offer you 20% Of
the total fund while the balance will be invested by you. I await your
soonest response Respectfully

yours,
Rose kone

[kurquhart]

Are you saying that you have an email address dedicated solely for PCASDR emails, and this spam showed up there?

[MR LIPP]

I started one for DE and one for Tours. I made the addresses just for this reason. It came in on Martin <pcasdr-de@cox.net>, but I posted it because it is so ridiculously obvious as a scam that it is funny.

[lrayner]

Martin, I think you are missing a most excellent opportunity. Perhaps you could suggest to Rose that she invest her millions in a new race track right here in San Diego County! No less likely to succeed than the various track plans that have surfaced over the years...

[993Panzer]

I started one for DE and one for Tours. I made the addresses just for this reason. It came in on Martin <pcasdr-de@cox.net>, but I posted it because it is so ridiculously obvious as a scam that it is funny.

I must be special because Rose sent me 5 emails to the same email address. None of the email addresses were pcasdr related.

[Dan Chambers]

Yup, I've gotten a couple of "emails" from cdi@pcasdr.... about mortgage rates, discount prescriptions, and other "sales." Looks like our email server/provider has been invaded/corrupted? Or .... ? I think this is a good rainy-day project for the tech-people/Emaster/online experts to sort out?

Happy hunting......

[Kim Crosser]

FYI - unfortunately, this kind of spam more frequently occurs when someone else's address book is compromised, rather than our server. Anyone who has sent/received e-mail from Club addresses likely has the address captured somewhere in their local address book. If that user's computer is invaded by a 'bot', all of the addresses in that book will get spammed.

Similarly, have you ever gotten an "unable to deliver mail" message, and didn't recognize the intended recipient? In that case, a spam bot found someone's address book with both your e-mail address and the recipient's address, and tried to fake an e-mail from you to the other person. When it failed to deliver, the delivery failure bounced back to your mailbox.

With estimates of over 90-95% of all e-mail being spam, about all you can hope for is that your ISP/e-mail provider has some pretty good anti-spam filters working. I have Yahoo mail for my personal account, and their spam filter is very good. I get between 50 and 100 spam mails a day, but Yahoo only rarely allows one of these to get into my e-mail inbox, automatically sending the others into a Spam box, where I can skim the "from" and "subject" info, and then flush them, unread. Unfortunately, I do have to skim the spam, because about 1 in 200-300 that Yahoo declares as spam is a legitimate e-mail that I want to read.

The real unfortunate thing is that once your e-mail address gets captured by a spam bot, it is out there forever.

[MR LIPP]

Thanks Kim, great info. I have heard great things about G-mail cutting the spam to nothing. I keep separate email addresses for everything. Craigslist is notorious for email/phone number harvesting schemes for spam.