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Hello I'm New here! Joined: 02 Apr 2015 Posts: 19

I'd really like to post a couple of my baits here but instead of email format they are in mobile texts. I have screenshots of my conversation with scammers so in what way should I post them that is easy to read? Also..where is the appropriate place for them in these forums?

Posted: Thu Apr 02, 2015 5:31 am

Welcome to Eater.

Interestingly, we have a page to Publish Your Work Here

I don't know about posting a lot of screen shots, you would probably have to host them some place, but ask one of the friendly folks in Moderator green.

I do hope you have been practicing safe baiting. If in doubt, send a Moderator.
a screen shot to make sure that you won't compromise yourself here.

Hello I'm New here! Joined: 02 Apr 2015 Posts: 19

I don't think I've been practicing "safe" baiting. I've been reading some of the posts here. I'll explain better. I get scam texts sometimes through my work phone. The scam artists get my number from my business website. So they kind of already have my identity and the address of where I work. I mess with them but recently I went so far as to get one's bank account number and I took steps to get it shut down.

Maybe I need to read more here before I do that again.

Posted: Thu Apr 02, 2015 5:59 am

It is good that you are here!

I don't know for certain, but there is probably someone who can help you be safe even on texts. Of course it is best NOT to use your real life (RL) connections (phone, email address, street address etc.) when baiting.

For the most part scammers do not know what email or text number they send a scam to. Most of them use lists or random number dialers (auto dialer).

We are happy to help. We do have a topic specifically for helps, two below this one.

We also have Eater University which is a plethora of information.

Welcome!

Hello I'm New here! Joined: 02 Apr 2015 Posts: 19

Thank you! I appreciate that. I'm in the process of reading up. I was just jazzed that I did more than just have some fun with him, I actually got two stolen credit card numbers which I reported to the FTC and a bank account number that I reported to the fraud department at Bank of America.

Other than that I offered him pubic hair coloring and butt hair braiding as well as a piña-colada enema as spa treatments and he thought they all sounded delightful.

Posted: Thu Apr 02, 2015 6:38 am

Paranoid has given you some good advice.

You can bait these scammers. You will need to get a google voice number or a free text number. Reply/text to him with the new number..

Quickly, try to get him to go to email. You will need a baiting email address (gmail or hotmail) not linked to you.

Then respond to the scammer with a fake company name.

Report the Bank Accounts and CC accounts to a Moderator here.

Hello I'm New here! Joined: 02 Apr 2015 Posts: 19

Okay...I will do that...should I still report them here even if I've already reported them to the bank and FTC?

Baiting Guru Joined: 10 Oct 2010 Posts: 3877

hello and welcome to eater.

as the others pointed out, safe-baiting is very important here.

so far there is one chance of baiting safe with your lads: use your real work-phone for catching lads (as catcher-account) and start communicating with the lads from a totally unrelated phone number (cheap anonymous prepaid simcard), or if he provides you with a mail-address, use that.

they pump out tons of messages every day, so they won't figure out that they got response from someone who didn't even receive their initial mail (and even if someone figures it out, just tell him, that he sent the mail to the wrong person in your company...)

EDIT: and never refer to your real-life name, make something up and use a company name that screams big and important. for example, www.massivedynamics.com , which is actually just a website for a tv-scifi-show and the company in that show.

Posted: Thu Apr 02, 2015 9:30 am

Hi spagirl,

yes, you can Private message me or any other mod (folks in green) with bank account and cc information. The site has connections for reporting both.

Welcome to Eater!

Posted: Thu Apr 02, 2015 11:02 am

Welcome to Eater and congratulations on the piggies!

What they said about safe baiting.

Posted: Thu Apr 02, 2015 11:30 am

Quote:

I offered him pubic hair coloring and butt hair braiding as well as a piña-colada enema as spa treatments and he thought they all sounded delightful.

Where do I sign? Take my money!

Welcome to Eater. Very Happy

Posted: Thu Apr 02, 2015 1:33 pm

Robert Heinrich der 1. wrote:

hello and welcome to eater.

as the others pointed out, safe-baiting is very important here.

so far there is one chance of baiting safe with your lads: use your real work-phone for catching lads (as catcher-account) and start communicating with the lads from a totally unrelated phone number (cheap anonymous prepaid simcard), or if he provides you with a mail-address, use that. [...] ..)

EDIT: and never refer to your real-life name, make something up and use a company name that screams big and important. for example, www.massivedynamics.com , which is actually just a website for a tv-scifi-show and the company in that show.

Just to be clear. do NOT let your lads know that you are the same person whose RL details they already have--even if it is only work details. START FRESH BAITS with these guys. Do not allude to the previous contact.

DROP ALL contact with them related to the previously made ones with your details. You do not need to explain anything. Just go silent. Please do this no matter how well the bait has been going. Trust us. There will be PLENTY of others in the future.

Welcome.

Baiting Guru Joined: 10 Oct 2010 Posts: 3877

^^^^

oh yes, that point can't be stressed enough. start fresh baits and never let your lad know that he has rl-details (somewhere in his mailing-list).

they have connections to virtually any place on earth (even usa, maybe south america is a bit more safe), and if they are pissed enough, they might ask buddies to show up at their victims home or work (that's why you should not use a collegues or other persons name, nor should you use an existing address... unless maybe pensylvania avenue 1600 washington dc).

Posted: Thu Apr 02, 2015 5:15 pm

spagirl, I was also thinking, it is important to make sure that you are dealing with a scammer, not a spammer.

We do not bait spammers, that is beyond our purview.

Hello I'm New here! Joined: 02 Apr 2015 Posts: 19

How do I know the difference?

Posted: Thu Apr 02, 2015 6:48 pm

If he's requesting services, it sure doesn't sound l Ike a spammer.

Posted: Thu Apr 02, 2015 8:05 pm

spagirl wrote:

How do I know the difference?

To elaborate on Capone’s reply:

Spammers are the (usually) annoying people who send out thousands of emails soliciting for a business or service or even for charity contributions that actually exists. They hope to get your donation or your business and their emails are pretty much on par with most of the hardcopy junk email you likely get every day.

We do not bait them because being annoying is not criminal--Which also explains why I am still at large. A specific sort we do not bait are people who offer to help you with magic or religion, even for a fee. Just because we might not share their specific belief and even though most westerners find soliciting desperate people by saying you can pray away their illness or troubles or get them a love for money is repugnant, the solicitor may feel they are providing a real service for a fee. Also, some of these people will use animal sacrifice in their rituals which we absolutely do not encourage. Simply ignore them.

I suspect your question might be rephrased, "How do you tell the difference between a legitimate spam vs a scammer spam?" as many scammers open with business / service or charity donation requests.

Let's start with the easy, basics: You can instantly know all of the following types of emails are scams. The following will have some overlap:
- Any offer for a deal you easily recognize would be illegal: e.g. asking you to lie about being next of kin, etc.
- Any offer that includes a demand / request for a fee to be paid up front, especially if they want you to send via western union or money gram. Legit businesses do not do this.
- Any email that tells you have won something, especially a lottery or promotional prize.
- Anything that tells you that you are due compensation from some unsettled contract or inheritance or because you have been a victim.
- Any email from a total stranger who “likes your profile” and wants a relationship with you. They will never say what it is about your profile that is so appealing. These will include romance scammers and scammers who want your help in getting either their inheritance or in getting money from some kind of idle bank account that is not theirs
- Offers to buy large amounts of gold, diamonds, oil or other expensive commodities—period. No legitimate vendor of wholesale goods spams offers. They need reliable, known clients, not random people on the internet—and as for gold specifically, no seller would bypass the actual commodities market where they will always get market value at least rather than the discount offered you.
- Declarations of love made to you, especially when all you have said is something like, “Do I know you?” in reply to an initial email
- Anything that threatens you with legal action or physical violence of you do not comply.
- Anything from the FBI—they do not conduct investigations or any business with citizens via unsolicited email—likewise for any government agency of any government on the planet—or the UN—or the IMF, etc.

Charity requests are a different animal. Because we use email accounts set up to attract and catch scammers, we rarely see legitimate charity requests, but that does not mean that such requests are lad-sent stuff. We do not want to waste the time of legit charities on baits—even if the charities might seem dodgy to us. We strongly advise you to not bait any charity request unless you have absolutely confirmed it is a scam.

How can you tell? That depends on the type of scam.

 Orphanage / Church or House of Worship Work scams-
These can be tricky. I have found that most such requests come from organizations that profess very specific religious beliefs. I reply to such requests politely that due to internet fraud we (implying I am part of an organization) are no longer able to donate to unsolicited email requests. Legitimate charities will understand and not waste their time or yours trying to convince you otherwise. Scammers; however, will smell cash because he now thinks you would give money otherwise.

They will reply swearing they are honest and you can trust them / visit / whatever. At this point it is good to find out what they claim is their religious creed. Imply that you have one yourself but do not reveal it. Scammers cannot resist calling on God to help them scam “fellow” believers, so a scammer will reply with a solid declaration of usually Christian bone fides. Whatever their specific belief you must confirm that yours is in direct conflict. If your devout Christian from an email before is willing to profess Satan as Lord the next day, you know you have a lad on the line. If he drops you because of it either you lost a legit charity—and waste no more of his or her time, or you have dropped a lad who lacks enough imagination to play along, and would be a lack-luster bait anyway—but better safe than sorry.

 Disaster relief scams--
These center on natural or man-made disasters ranging from epidemics and typhoons to terror attacks or political chaos. To confirm a scammer, you can employ a similar tactic: make a counter offer to fund something that flies in the face of their cause. If they want help with earthquake relief, tell them you feel you cannot meddle in God’s affairs, but you will be happy to invest in building a nuclear power plant on the fault line there because you know they will need to buy energy as soon as the recover. If the cause is to help terror victims, tell then you support the attacking side. Hint that you have friends in that organization who want to buy girls for slaves (We’ve seen baiters do this nicely for ISIS and Boko Haram.)

Just do be sure to make such an email something that any RL investigator will easily recognize is baiting—especially if you are writing from the USA where the law allows government programs to sniff for key words in emails that flag terrorism. If your lad suddenly wants to help you procure explosives or whatever, you know you have a lad, so bait away.

Any charity listed on scamwarners.com is fair game.

This is getting way too long, so I’ll stop here.

Posted: Thu Apr 02, 2015 8:45 pm

Welcome to Eater. Congrats on obtaining compromised bank accounts and stolen credit cards. If you think that you will be sticking around here go ahead and add them to your sig line. You get a Closed lad accounts

for every bank account and a

for every credit card.

Go to edit profile and add the following to your signature. The code for the pink pig is :$ _lad: and the code for the black pig is :$ _crd: Just omit the space after the $

Looking forward to seeing your pig sty grow.

Hello I'm New here! Joined: 02 Apr 2015 Posts: 19

I would definitely say this is a scam I'm dealing with. to skim is pretty common in the beauty circles we get them all the time. It goes as follows...

We get a text or email asking to book services and pay in advance. they then want to book 5 or 6 Services usually of a high dollar amount and say they are sending X amount of people to the salon or spa to receive the services. they say they are ready to pay but want you to do them a favor which is charge the card that they're going to give you extra to pay the driver that is going to bring all of these people to the salon or spa. if one of us is stupid enough to not see through the scam they will proceed to give you stolen credit card numbers to charge the large amount to and then they ask you either to Western Union the money to them or in my case deposit it in a bank account in cash. then the stolen credit card transaction is disputed and the charge is reversed except the money that you deposited extra comes out of your own pocket to cover what you didn't get from the card. And of course that money is gone.

Posted: Thu Apr 02, 2015 9:40 pm

^ definite scam. We've seen this before, it goes on with boat hire, hotel reservations, all sorts of things. Well spotted.

As you will know, if a client pays one way it doesn't get refunded another way. If it's booked on a card it goes back to that card, no exceptions.

Baiting Guru Joined: 03 May 2007 Posts: 18313

Very definitely a scam! You have a good understanding of how it works.

We have a forum on our sister site, ScamWarners.com, specifically for scams targeting businesses. There is an informational topic describing this type of scam there, too: https://www.scamwarners.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=23020

Feel free to post the ones you receive there in case someone else does a search on the info, they'll realize it is a scam.

Hello I'm New here! Joined: 02 Apr 2015 Posts: 19

Well if I were to do this scam baiting regularly I think I'd want to specialize in these types of scams. I network with a lot of other beauticians who get these texts and they're already offering to forward them to me.

So how would I start? Create some characters and just keep them going for as long as I can? Think I might need someone to help me. I can work on it in between my appointments throughout the day.

Posted: Thu Apr 02, 2015 11:04 pm

If you get too many of them to handle then feel free to post a listing in Surplus or ask for more hands in Main.

A disadvantage as i see it is that if these come in by SMS then the sender will know who he has sent them to, so you may end up identifiable as a result.

A tactic may be to say that a friend referred this booking to you as she was booked up, though Wink

there's always an excuse ...

Hello I'm New here! Joined: 02 Apr 2015 Posts: 19

Would it still be too easy to identify me if I ask for their email to connect them with the receptionist?

Posted: Thu Apr 02, 2015 11:24 pm

if you use the phone it came in on - the one you use for work - then yes, you can be identified.
Ideally you need a layer of separation between you and them, like a disposable mobile that you can reply from, even though you didn't get the message in on it. Email is a lot easier in this respect since it's so much easier to set up untraceable addresses.