i thought i was special!!

you know i was engaged in a correspondence with mr. wang, which was very entertaining, at least to me.

i am very sad that he has broken it off. i was really hoping that as my responses got progressively more bizarre he would continue to send me instructions in his fraud.

really and truly, though, i doubt anyone bothered to read my carefully crafted emails until the very last round. what i think happens with this particular scam is that there are set responses and it matters not one bit what you write so long as you do write, until they get to the part where they ask you for actual information.

and of course i took a moment or two to google mr. wang and found a couple of interesting things.

mr. wang hongzhang is actually this guy, a legitimate chinese bank executive. the CATER ALLEN PRIVATE BANK, i am surprised to learn, is a legitimate bank.

i had never given internet scams much thought before this because i don;t give an awful lot of thought or analysis to what goes directly into my trash bin.

but it makes sense that a scammer would use the names of real persons or institutions just in case the greedy credulous of the world wish to google the project and check for legitimacy.

first, a word about to greedy credulous of the world. if there are big wads of cash floating around in the world, somebody has found a way to claim them. they do not need you to pretend to be next of kin or open an account or help to make transfers in any way. big wads of cash have plenty of claimants and big banks have procedures for just that.

duh.

i also learned that email scammers LOVE to pretend to be mr. wang. here is a correspondance with my very same "mr. wang" and someone else, and here are two instances of either a different "mr. wang" or at least a "mr. wang" with a different address and text body.


in this second listing, i particularly like the note way down at the bottom:

NOTE TO DUMBASS SPAMMERS: My scam e-mail filtering system is pretty good but it isn't perfect. Occasionally a regular spam e-mail will get mistakenly published here as a 419 scam. This is inadvertent. If you are a spammer and you don't wish to have your crap mistakenly published on this website as a 419 advance fee scam, the solution is simple. Don't mail your crap to harvested e-mail addresses.

later on, maybe, i will analyze soem of the spam emails and talk about what's really going on.

in the meantime, i may just write mr. wang one last letter about my sadness over not hearing from him for lo these many days.