Scammer accidentally revealed her (college student) identity

By joining our community you will have the ability to post topics and access other forums reserved for members. Registration is quick, simple and absolutely free. Join our community today by clicking here.

Posted: Fri Oct 26, 2012 12:02 am

My apologies if this topic has been addressed before – I did run it through Search before posting.

I got a (very dramatic and quite well-written) scam letter today claiming to be from Emily Brocksopp, a "wealthy" lady in the UK running an orphanage (of course), and she's dying (of course), and needs a philanthropic soul to take over her fortune.

Although she signed it with her fake name and another email address, the From field on the email said "Emily Brocksopp <[email protected]>". And instead of mass BCCing it, she accidentally put "Recipient List <[email protected]>" in the CC field. (This is how Earthlink's Webmail formats emails; she probably didn't know it would list her real email address next to her fake name.)

When you reply to this email, the "reply to" address suddenly becomes the fake email address in another domain.

I'm tempted to reply to the email at <[email protected]> (last name omitted here), although she'd probably deny any affiliation with it.

My question: Even though we don't usually call these people out, if it's a U.S. college student, does that standard change? Or would you at least let the school know someone is using a Texas Tech University email address for fraudulent purposes? It's possible someone hacked into Sherry L.'s account. Or would you just let it go?

This is my first new topic post; if I screwed up or revisited a past topic, please slap my hand. Very Happy

Elite Baiter Joined: 19 Jan 2009 Posts: 1440

I'm sure "Sherry" would deny affiliation with this, since she's not a scammer. Lads regularly hack and steal other people's email addresses and for some reason university email addys are very popular - perhaps they're easy to steal?

There is someone here who deals with stolen .edu mail addys. I'll check and get back to you.

ETA: send the email, with the full names and full header to Morgain Le Fay
http://forum.419eater.com/forum/profile.php?mode=viewprofile&u=60356

Posted: Fri Oct 26, 2012 5:43 pm

Lads will also just make up a "return address" and use that. I had a long-running bait that went sour and my lad was so pissed that he used my baiter address for the return and I got flooded with "undeliverable" messages.

Of course, he also used several alternate addresses in his text, so I hammered him again from another persona....but that's a different story!

Scammer accidentally revealed her (college student) identity	View next topic View previous topic