Interesting Spam

~ Cheryl

Well, here’s a new development (all sic):

SOMEONE YOU CALL YOUR FRIEND, WANTS YOU DEAD.

I felt very sorry and bad for you, that your life is going to end like this if you don’t comply, i was paid to eliminate you and I have to do it within10 days. Someone you call your friend wants you dead by all means, and the person havespent a lot of money on this, the person also came to us and told us that he wants you dead and he provided us your names, photograph and other necessaryinformation we needed about you.

The email goes on like that for some time, eventually demanding $12,000 in return for considering sparing my life. I’m pretty sure it is a general spam because it is sent to “undisclosed recipients” rather than me personally. It purportedly comes from an email address in Poland, but there’s also what appears to be a legit gmail address in the message. Anyone got any ideas who are the best people to report this to?

8 thoughts on “Interesting Spam”

  1. I don’t know jurisdictions thre, but as it is Poland, I am guessing Interpol.

    And, perhaps, Google.

  2. Those were my first two thoughts, but looking at their web sites neither of them appears terribly interested in such things. It isn’t a big enough issue for Interpol, and Google only wants reports of security problems with their services. The UK police are only interested if the crime is clearly located in the UK. The FBI are only interested if you have actually been defrauded. My guess is that there is so much of this stuff that they only bother to follow up if they have a good handle on the perps because you’ve handed over money. And of course I wouldn’t be bothering myself if it didn’t seem like this was a very unwholesome development that is liable to terrify some people.

  5. Arnie, I am sure, has much more sense and much more style. But anonymous hate mail does get sent. There are people in fandom who know how to do it. And one reason for posting this here is because if it is supposed to be a “joke” then I want whoever is responsible to have an opportunity to apologize before this gets into the hands of people like the FBI.

  6. A friend of mine received this email a few days ago. I hadn’t seen it before, but some googling showed that it’s all over the place. It looks like a sort of turned-around hostile version of a Nigerian “send me money” spam.

    I think you can assume that all of the normal abuse-reporting places have seen it by now.

Comments are closed.