Killing Gmail Scams

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Posted: Mon Dec 05, 2011 10:04 am

I am sure this info is already here (somewhere on this forum), so sorry for double posting!

I used the link below to report James Arney [[email protected]] scam to Google, so I hope they will shutdown his gmail account.

This is all I can do for now, but hope to learn more to Unplug this dirt bag for good.
.

I send my report to:
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=abuse

Posted: Mon Dec 05, 2011 10:10 am

Please read here regarding the board's stance on killing email addresses http://forum.419eater.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=105921.

Posted: Mon Dec 05, 2011 10:40 am

Read you advice and it does not apply to me.
It was me who got the scam email, and I decided to send the killing note to Google.
To clarify: I did not get that email from your database., it was in MY inbox, and I do with it what I want.
The reson for posting is to warn others about this scam, and I belive this site is for that purpose.

Posted: Mon Dec 05, 2011 10:45 am

There is no point warning about the scam if you have killed the email address. The scammer will just set up another email address and use that.

You are not doing the victims of these scams any favours, all you are doing is causing the scammer 5 minutes extra work.

Posted: Mon Dec 05, 2011 10:55 am

Are you actualy sugesting to let this scammer continue his work ?
Sending gmails with dangerous link to Craigslist Log In site (a fake one).

What is the purpose of letting him live?
How do you propse to stop him?

And I do not agree, as far I know Google can block him (his IP) from setting up new gmail accounts.

Posted: Mon Dec 05, 2011 11:10 am

He will continue whether or not you close his account down.

He may not be able to open a new gmail account, but there is always Yahoo, Hotmail, Mail.com etc

You can't stop him, we can't stop him but by leaving his email address alone, he will continue using the same one and anyone who does a search on his email address will find your post on ScamWarners.

Anyone doing a search on [email protected] (or whatever address he sets up next) will find nothing and therefore might assume that his email is legit.

Baiting Guru Joined: 27 Mar 2011 Posts: 21158

Wouldn't it be better to report that to CL? Taking out his phishing site is much better than ending his email.

Posted: Mon Dec 05, 2011 6:42 pm

You are right @ next victim
I reported that phising web site to the domain host
Website.org

The point is to warn the people here who did log in at the phishing web site to change they log in on Craigslist.

Posted: Mon Dec 05, 2011 7:06 pm

http://members-questions-ad.website.org/

Quote:

The domain members-questions-ad.website.org is locked in the moment.

Following my report from this weekend, they have shut down that Phising website.

Does that count as a kill??
Do I get a trophy? jump_4_joy

Baiting Guru Joined: 27 Mar 2011 Posts: 21158

Borderline wrote:

You are right @ next victim
I reported that phising web site to the domain host
Website.org

The point is to warn the people here who did log in at the phishing web site to change they log in on Craigslist.

It would be a rare occasion for me to be right. I just throw ideas out here. There is a reason we do not kill emails as b8er pointed out. Killing an email does nothing in the long run. I realize it was your mail to do as you please, but it doesn't keep victims away from him.

Posted: Mon Dec 05, 2011 8:15 pm

I still do not agree with the rule of not killing the email.
I am for the total blackout.
I will chase this scamer to the deepest ends of the hell.
I will close his gmail, yahoo, msn, mail.com ......
and all his scam websites that I find

so at the end he might be left with the kazakhstan.com email account.
Then when he is ripe, I will pay him a vist for a FtF meeting, bracke his little fingers and burn his equipment.
Evil or Very Mad

Posted: Tue Dec 06, 2011 2:52 pm

^^ And you will probably end up with your throat cut.

We do not close email addresses for the reasons already pointed out - ie: he won't even break into a sweat and will just open another one.
The problem we then have is that we have a lad in the wild and no record of him. This screws baiters, our friends at scamwarners.com and, most importantly, the victims who could have been saved by Googling the lad's address.

So you may think that you are justified in closing the lad's account because you received his scam but you may have condemned the other people who got it into having their money stolen.

Posted: Tue Dec 06, 2011 4:06 pm

Why would you join this site and post for the sole purpose of telling us that you don't like our rules?

Posted: Tue Dec 06, 2011 8:45 pm

I see you have made it over to Eater as suggested, Borderline. I know you are frustrated with these scammers and want to see them pay. You will find that the people here share your feelings on that subject, and that is why we do what we do.

If you haven’t spent a lot of time dealing with these scammers and learning their methods, some of our practices may not seem to make sense. Our position on free email addresses is one of those practices that can cause confusion.

In an ideal world, when someone sent out scam emails, you would report them, they would be blacklisted in some way, and they would be blocked from sending emails ever again. Unfortunately this is not an ideal world.

Let’s look at a typical scenario.

Let’s say that a Craigslist scammer decides he’s going to call himself John Smith. He opens a free email address, [email protected]. Does he stop there? Probably not. He will also open [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], and a few others (I am making up these addresses—the point is the scammer will open several addresses to support his fake identity, and it will be impossible to tell them apart from many similar but real addresses). Why? Because he is preparing in advance for the possibility that his address will be closed.

He then goes to Craigslist in various cities, and he sends the same exact response (which is pre-written) from [email protected] to dozens, if not hundreds, of ads, and waits for the replies to come in. If he is an experienced scammer, he probably has all incoming replies automatically forwarded to his second address, [email protected], or at least he manually forwards any that look promising to another mailbox. Then he keeps going, sending further scripted emails to the victims who continue to believe in him. Tomorrow or next week, he will repeat the same exact routine with the new Craigslist ads.

In the meantime, one of his victims figures out that he is a scammer, and goes to scamwarners or somewhere else and posts that information. Tomorrow, when he sends his next set of emails out, a new victim who receives his email will google [email protected], learn he is a scammer, and avoid being scammed.

But, what happens if you reported [email protected], and yahoo closed the email address? They won’t prevent him from using other addresses he has already created, or worst case for him, creating a new one - which will take a couple of minutes at most. He still has the information on his current victims, because he made sure he saved that (scammers are not stupid--if they were, they wouldn't be successful.) If he had victims close to paying, he tells them that he has a new email address, and just keeps going on his scam. You have cost him less than 5 minutes. Your planned "blackout" is not going to happen. You have no idea how many addresses he has, or even what other names he is using (chances are he is scamming under names besides John Smith). He is using internet cafes and fake information, so you have no way to keep track of him, or to tell him apart from hundreds of other scammers using the exact same approach. Tomorrow, he will send his NEW set of scams out from [email protected]. When a victim receives it, she will google [email protected] and guess what? She won’t find anything to tell her that he is a scammer, and she is more likely to send money. Even worse, if he has gotten a really large amount of money from someone, the authorities might actually open an investigation—and the trail will stop cold, because the email address, and all of the emails from the box, are gone.

Now take it a step further, and say that instead you respond to his approach, looking like a victim. You have lots of questions, and if he wants money, he’s going to have to take time to answer them. A few rounds of this, and he has spent a lot more than 5 minutes trying to lure you into his trap. Then, you find this really cool way to send the money in a secure way. All he has to do is click some things to get the MTCN. So he spends another couple of hours trying to get the MTCN. Then, when you decide to give him the money directly, you get the MTCN wrong, or you “accidentally” gave it to another scammer. By now he has spent hours trying to get your money—and in those hours, he hasn’t been able to contact real victims. He is tired, frustrated, and angry. He wastes even more time sending out insults or confronting the scammer he thinks stole from him. In the meantime, several of his “real” victims are finding the warning on scamwarners, so they aren’t sending money either. When he finally gives up on you, he still thinks that you are someone who can be scammed – so he waits a bit, and he approaches you again using one of his other scams. Now you have another one of his addresses and scam scripts, and can warn even more victims—and you can waste his time all over again. Everyone wins (except the scammer, of course.)

As far as websites go, though, we are in total agreement on killing those. A website can make a scam look legitimate - which we don't want. Plus, when a website is killed, it will take the scammer quite a bit more than 5 minutes to reinstate it, even if he saved the site contents.

Posted: Tue Dec 06, 2011 8:49 pm

^^^^^

Very well put.................. clapping

Posted: Tue Dec 06, 2011 9:10 pm

Dorothy explained things far more eloquently and completely than I could.

The bottom line is simply that while you may think you are hurting the scammer by getting his email closed down, in fact the opposite is true. You are hurting victims. From the scammer's point of view, having his email closed is less of an annoyance than a mosquito bite. It simply doesn't matter to him, but it wastes your time and makes it harder for victims to find out that it's a scam.

Your good intentions would be far better served by baiting them, by publicizing their "formats" and addresses on Scamwarners, and by educating all of your friends and acquaintances to the dangers of Internet scams. Closing down email accounts is counterproductive.

Posted: Tue Dec 06, 2011 9:15 pm

Very well put, Dorothy.

I would like to add the following question: How many active baiting accounts does everyone have? It's easy to assume that a lad would have several, when every baiter probably would have quite a few to mess with the lads. It goes both way, we usually just end up on top, because they think we have something they want.

(About my own question, I have 7 active accounts (not counting my catcher), as well as two accounts I have reserved for extra use in a bait only)

Posted: Tue Dec 06, 2011 10:15 pm

Borderline wrote:

Does that count as a kill??
Do I get a trophy? jump_4_joy

No. We do not get flags or trophies for killing phishing sites. Only for killing fake websites used in 419 AFF scams that have been posted in the FB forum and DBd.

Posted: Tue Dec 06, 2011 10:34 pm

I would add, for Borderline's benefit, that one of the reasons that we do not kill e-mail addresses is that it could potentially thwart a law enforcement investigation into a particular mugu.

Would you want to responsible for that?

Bruin

Posted: Wed Dec 07, 2011 12:17 am

@Dorothy

Finally an Intelligent (and educative) comment, rather than just been told not to kill emails, because it is the rule here.
I hate rules!

OK
I will leave the emails untouched, but will continue to kill sites.
QUESTION:
Is there an email search here to quickly find out if it is a scam email address?

Here are some I got (it looks like the scammer world loves me)

Financial Service [[email protected]]
RolexWatchReplicas [[email protected]]
Local HookUp [[email protected]]
Sarah R [[email protected]]
Kwesi Johnson [[email protected]]
AGENT JOHN SIMMONS [[email protected]]
Etc……

PS
see my PM to you explaining why I wanted to kill the gmail scams.

Posted: Wed Dec 07, 2011 12:27 am

bearkat419 wrote:

Why would you join this site and post for the sole purpose of telling us that you don't like our rules?

I like to challenge any rule that
1-does not make sense
or 2- is not explained

I do not join websites to blindly follow the rules.
I challenge them.

Posted: Wed Dec 07, 2011 12:46 am

DoraTheExplorer wrote:

Borderline wrote:

Does that count as a kill??
Do I get a trophy? jump_4_joy

No. We do not get flags or trophies for killing phishing sites. Only for killing fake websites used in 419 AFF scams that have been posted in the FB forum and DBd.

NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
that’s it??
After all the hard work I did, saving lots of innocent ppl in process.
I GET NOTHING?

What is AFF ?

PS
Was it you who did not like my previous avi?
How do u like this one?

Posted: Wed Dec 07, 2011 1:07 am

^^^ For an answer to AFF read http://forum.419eater.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=176248#419faq

Since you don't like rules and guidelines you probably won't read the FAQ posted at the start of this forum (MAIN SCAMBAITING FORUM) so I will give you the short answer

Quote:

AFF = Advance Fee Fraud

Posted: Wed Dec 07, 2011 1:13 am

Borderline wrote:

I do not join websites to blindly follow the rules.
I challenge them.

BL, I think if you hang around this forum long enough you will find that the rules are few, make a great deal of sense, and widely supported by the members.

We don't close email accounts for reasons that have been adequately explained already.

We don't cash bait because it is illegal and makes the cash baiter only marginally more ethical than the scammer.

We don't hack into lad accounts because it is illegal and could get the forum shut down.

We don't involve innocent third parties because it could cause harm to someone who has nothing to do with the scam.

We don't tolerate racism for reasons I don't have to explain.

I see no grounds for challenging these rules.

Welcome and read the tutorials.

Posted: Wed Dec 07, 2011 1:33 am

Regarding your list of email addresses:

You have a mixture of spammer and scammer here. #2 and #3 are definitely spammers, and #4 is more likely a spammer (no searching involved, experience will help you to separate them).

#1 and 6 are very likely to be scammers, and 5 has definite potential to be a scammer.

But--since we don't list addresses as scams here without evidence (another one of those pesky rules, but we are careful to only target the guilty, and have to make sure our site isn't used by disgruntled people who want their ex boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse harassed, or even scammers going for revenge on a former victim - and yes, it really does happen)--the best thing to do is to post the actual email you received, and we can usually verify quite quickly whether it is a scam.

If you are simply trying to research for yourself so you know, there are two good approaches: (1) google the entire email address in quotes. Google will pick up most of eater (there are a few forums that aren't searched, but the rest are constantly being indexed by the google bots) and it will pick up scamwarners and a bunch of other scam-related forums too. (2) Use the search function in the main menu at the top of the forum here.
If you only use one approach, use google.

Try google with addresses #1, 5, and 6 on your list, and the answer will be very clear.

As far as websites go:
We do recommend forwarding all phishing emails to the real companies (for example, paypal phishing goes to [email protected], etc.) The sites being impersonated can often kill those sites very quickly, because their copyright is being infringed.

For the AFF sites we deal with, site killing requires more effort. Site killers have to research these sites, and identify the things that prove they are fraudulent. They have to provide enough evidence for a listing in the fake site database. The site killers also have to track down the host info, and they have to write up a report that is clear, concise, and sufficient to convince the host that the site is in violation of their terms of service. If they can't convince the host, they may have to do the same for the registrar. They are awarded flags because of the work they put into killing the sites.

And see my pm for the answer to your other concern about IP's.