Scammers using regular mail

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Posted: Thu Aug 24, 2017 3:45 pm

Top of the day to you all!

I'm guessing nobody knows who I am Crying or Very sad

It's been a long time since I logged in. Anyway, I used to be around here a lot Very Happy

Now I have a real life!!

But, going back on track. Today, I had a wonderful surprise. A scam letter showed up in my real life inbox. Many years ago, I said that the idiots were oversaturating the Internet to the point where it wasn't going to be profitable anymore. It seems I was right... unfortunately... Now, they can reach people that hasn't been exposed to the virtual scam with something that it's more believable, just because it's real, because it can be touched.

Here's the scan of the letter. Have fun with this pe(s)t! Also, spread the news. There's no better defense than knowledge.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B__FRnOllYy1X0huTkQ3TWVvYkU

Yours truly Razz

Posted: Thu Aug 24, 2017 4:21 pm

Nice to see them spending money on postage anyway...

Hello I'm New here! Joined: 28 Jul 2017 Posts: 19

Cool! I've never heard of scam letters. lol

Posted: Thu Aug 24, 2017 4:45 pm

This fax made it's way around Reddit a few weeks ago:

https://i.redd.it/ob3a7dguivcz.jpg

Posted: Thu Aug 24, 2017 5:15 pm

690Cals wrote:

This fax made it's way around Reddit a few weeks ago:

I think that the important detail here is that it came to my home with my real name. I'm not paranoid, there are many ways to get that information. The phone book to begin with. But it's a level of sophistication that I haven't seen before. Not counting the ancient times of the Nigerian love letter, back in the '30s? '40s?

I think this could be a lot more convincing. The fax can be doubted, maybe it was a mistake in dialing, there's no name, no specifics. This is a letter, real one, tangible, and it has my real name, sent to my real address.
I'm taking it lightly but it's scarily dangerous.

And yes, they're spending/wasting money on this one. Which makes it even more concerning. The leter came through Royal Mail, so it's an operation based on the UK. And it's marked at 1.40 pounds. Anyone knows how to understand the Royal Mail stamp?

Elite Baiter Joined: 28 Mar 2015 Posts: 1916

^ Sounds like they paid £1.40p (0ne pound and forty pence) for the stamp.

Posted: Thu Aug 24, 2017 6:48 pm

Reminds me of the abhorrent 'Prophet' Popoff, who asks vulnerable adults to submit money as a sacrifice to God so that they may have all of their debts cancelled. His mistake was sending a freepost return with it - he ended up with one or two bricks.

Posted: Thu Aug 24, 2017 7:27 pm

You mean my bottle of "Miracle Water" isn't miraculous?

Rats.

Posted: Thu Aug 24, 2017 7:57 pm

My husband got a lottery scam by snail mail. A shiny brochure, printed on expensive paper, with a link to a real company (stolen of course). It came all the way from Malaysia.

The problem was that my husband has friends in Malaysia, and he thought they had entered him into the lottery as a surprise. I asked him to google the phone number, and bingo - it popped up on a scam warning site.

No idea where the scammers harvested the address.

Posted: Thu Aug 24, 2017 8:12 pm

UK has plenty of scams going on sadly.

Many scammer starts the search from here:

https://www.gov.uk/get-information-about-a-company

It happened in my company as well when one (fake) yahoo director email sent an email to another director asking to pay money to xyz urgently...

Exclamation

Just be safe and always doubt everything...

Posted: Thu Aug 24, 2017 8:36 pm

^^At least the quality of the packaging has improved.

The first scam communication I ever saw was a letter my brother-in-law got via snail mail at his jewelry store in the late '80s. It had a Nigeria postmark, no return address and was addressed in longhand to "CEO, [name of BIL's business]. Inside was a mimeographed copy of an overpayment format.

Back to the future?

loualsindor wrote:

You mean my bottle of "Miracle Water" isn't miraculous?

Rats.

Not by a long shot. Here is an excerpt from a GQ article about Popoff:

Quote:

. . . I took the Garden State Parkway to have a look at Unit Pack, a family-run firm that specializes in packaging those little samples of shampoo, pharmaceuticals, and the like. I met the very friendly father and two sons who owned the place, and they confirmed for me that they do business with Popoff, but they didn't say much more.

And then, on my way out, I got even closer to the truth. I was walking out toward my car when I saw a guy pulling down the metal door at a loading dock on the side of the building. He looked 30-ish and was wearing a Cowboys baseball cap and a greasy Unit Pack jumper. Two rings through his lower lip framed his broad smile. We started talking. He said he was the only guy in receiving—if it came to Unit Pack, it came to him. I asked about Popoff.

“Yeah, we do him,” the man said. “We go through Poland Spring.”

“The Popoff water is Poland Spring?” I asked.

“Yeah, they deliver it right here,” he said. “Paul is the guy who does the deliveries. Once or twice a month he comes. For Peter Popoff, we do 35 gallon-size jugs at a time, once or twice a month. One time they came with 130 gallon-size jugs.”

And then he said something mysterious, maybe even beautiful. I still can't decide. Popoff, he said, sends his own pre-blessed water, in a 16-ounce bottle, to add to all the jugs of Poland Spring. So that every little package of water contains a few molecules of holiness.

“I'm the one who pours the blessed water into the drums,” said the man with the lip rings. “I measure it out and add it into the drums.”

See the full article at https://www.gq.com/story/peter-popoff-born-again-scoundrel

Posted: Thu Aug 24, 2017 8:37 pm

I've heard about the UK ones. I haven't seen them in the USA, so don't really know much about them. I doubt it's anything to do with you personally, more likely just a coincidence.

Maybe someone in the UK (or just someone with more knowledge on snail-mail scams) can answer this... do they normally come with first-class postage versus something like bulk mail (or whatever the UK version of that is)?

Posted: Thu Aug 24, 2017 8:56 pm

Ours came with normal mail - we are in Straya.

Posted: Fri Aug 25, 2017 4:39 pm

Padme wrote:

I've heard about the UK ones. I haven't seen them in the USA, so don't really know much about them. I doubt it's anything to do with you personally, more likely just a coincidence.

Maybe someone in the UK (or just someone with more knowledge on snail-mail scams) can answer this... do they normally come with first-class postage versus something like bulk mail (or whatever the UK version of that is)?

I'm not worried about it. Not personally at least. I'm surprised to see that they move back to snail mail, like they did in times before the Internet. It's a more sophisticated operation that spamming from a filthy cyber using Yahoo accounts. They have to pick my name, go check the phone book, print a personalized letter, etc.

I can confirm that they took the address information from the local phone book. It's exact to the letter, and there are a couple details that are odd about the way these phone book have the addresses that are not usual in other places and certainly not the way I write it.

I doubt they took my name from the phone book, it doesn't make any sense. But it shows that there was at least one working brain cell behind it. It had to look for me, get my address from a phone book in Spanish, understand that my last name is Japanese, look for a proper name for my "uncle", etc.

The stamp is International Standard. There's a cheaper alternative, International Economy that it's about 30% less expensive. I wonder why they didn't take it.

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