419 letter addressed to yourself

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Posted: Wed Sep 14, 2011 7:55 am

Hello everyone,

I hope I'm in the right forum for this as it is something I have been thinking about the past two weeks.

I work in a school and on the first day back I had received a 419 scam mail into my work inbox. This is an e-mail address I never use outside of work.

What is even weirder is that the mail seems to be addressed to me personally as the header is "Dear <mysurname>" and the content of the e-mail could lead a potential victim to believe that there actually is a late relative somewhere that has left a fortune.

Is this a common practice?

I have never seen this before and even though it didn't really upset me (naturally I answered it from another address Wink

) I did get a bit ... disturbed by it.

Posted: Wed Sep 14, 2011 8:27 am

First of all: Good to see that you're baiting him from a "neutral" account - it means you have read the stickies, and knos that safe baiting should always be the #1 priority for any baiter. Wink

If your work mail address is advertized somewhere on the internet - and chances is that it is (on the school's webpage, for instance), it is very likely that it's been harvested some way - either by a bot, or manually by a lad. It's pretty common. When a lad sees a mail address - any mail address - all he sees is a potential victim. So to answer your question - yes, that's a more than common M.O. And the particular format you are mentioning is a so-called "Next Of Kin" (NOK) scam, which is very common as well - and very baitable. Wink

Posted: Wed Sep 14, 2011 9:32 am

You said you work in a school and therein lies the answer most likely. Schools tend to have mails of coworkers of their employees on their web page for obvious reasons. And if a parent can find your mail you can rest assured that a scammer or a harvesting bot can as well. And that you got a mail that was personalized was just a bit of a twist to make it more believable. It is a bit like the "good old days" when scammers sent their mails using an envelope and a stamp. Some still do by the way. Work for the scammer is increased but the likelihood for a paying victim is as well.
The one you got is somewhere in between the snail mail ones and the mass bulk ones as it uses advantages of both of the variants.

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