The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) is a UK-based Hotline for reporting illegal content. Specifically Child sexual abuse content hosted worldwide and criminally obscene and incitement to racial hatred content hosted in the UK.

It’s remit is to protect the citizens of the UK from illegal and offensive online content by allowing the public and IT professionals to report sites with potentially illegal online content. They work in partnership with the ISPs, law enforcement, government, the education sector, charities, international partners and the public to minimize the availability of this content.

They seek to find and report on child sexual abuse content hosted anywhere in the world and criminally obscene and incitement to racial hatred content hosted in the UK.

They use a ‘notice and take-down’ service which alerts ISPs to potentially illegal content on their servers and provide information to law enforcement partners in the UK and abroad.

As a direct result, less than 1% of child sexual abuse content, known to the IWF, has apparently been hosted in the UK since 2003, down from 18% in 1997.

As sexually abusive images of children are primarily hosted abroad, they provide a dynamic list of child sexual abuse URLs.

The IWF want web citizens, in the UK and abroad to report all and any content to them http://www.iwf.org.uk/reporting.htm

Scamdex is of the opinion that only community-led notification can help protect our children from being exposed to this obscenity and hopefully prevent children being exploited to feed this industry.

Report illegal Content

There’s one of those ‘Ebook’ thingys out there, being sold aggressively by a website called www.scamblackbook.com. I’m all in favor of information disseminiation but something about this site has me feeling uneasy.

ScamBlackBook.com Affiliate program image

Some questions - Has anyone seen this book and can they tell me whether it’s worth the rather steep $59 price tag?

Has anyone signed up as an affiliate? this seems to be the major selling method, and they pay out an (imho) impossibly high 75% commission.

So, I say again, I don’t want to dump on someone that’s doing a good public service (albeit an expensive one), but it would be very sad if the book about scams turned out to be a scam itself, wouldn’t it?

Please, soneone, tell me it’s all right!

As reported in the Washington Post’s “The Trail‘ section, here’s an email that’s making the rounds in Washington, and now, the rest of the world. No one is claiming authorship, but the ‘trail’ seems to start at the SEC. Enjoy!

Dear American:

I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.

I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.

I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transactin is 100% safe.

This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.

Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.

Yours Faithfully Minister of Treasury Paulson

Return-path: <HarryJantaman@un.org>
Delivery-date: Tue, 23 Sep 2008 13:55:08 -0700
(envelope-from <HarryJantaman@un.org>)
id 1KiEua-0001DI-Em
Received: from smtp-out.orange.net (smtp59.orange.fr [80.12.242.30])
X-ME-UUID: 20080923205501279.4453E6C00180@mwinf5902.orange.net
Reply-To: <”harryj@e-mile.co.uk, jan_harry”@un-aaid.org>
From: “H. Jantamanta” <HarryJantaman@un.org>
Subject: [Bulk?]From Harry & Partners
Message-Id: <20080923205501.4453E6C00180@mwinf5902.orange.net>

From: Harry Jantamanta
3 Whitehall Court, London,
SW1A 2EL London
Private Mobile: 44 704 576 2068

My name is Harry Jantamanta, UN humanitarian abuse reporter here in UN Independent Station United Kingdom.  I got your contact through cross border business information centre situated here in London as an online investor.

On behalf of my partners, I seek your assistance to accommodate and invest for us the sum of USD22.6M. The money in question is sourced to us by a particular head of states as a gesture for appreciation of a good work rendered to their country, but In line with the moral principal of our services, we are not required to accept gift of any kind nor own more than 10,000 USD in our respective bank account, hence our plea to be represented by a trust worthy person to accommodate and invest the sum for us. 

Please note that this request is not a hoax.

We count on your ability to accommodate and invest the funds for us until we are able to process our resignation successfully. 

If you are interested please provide me with the following in return email:

YOUR NAME IN FULL
YOUR OFFICE OR RESIDENTIAL ADDRESS
TEL AND FAX NUMBER 

As soon as I hear from you, further details regarding the transaction will be unveiled to you.

I look forward for your urgent response.

PhishTank.com - Anti Phishing Website!

Here’s the thing - from now on, ANY TIME you get an email that sends you to a PayPal/Bank of America/Google Adsense/eBay/your-bank-name site that you know is a scam site [that just wants your login/password/credit card/bank details] - immediately report it to PhishTank.com.

They are the database that many browsers and security firewalls automatically use - within seconds, millions of people are protected!.  To see if YOUR browser/network is using this service, try this url picked at random from Phishtank’s database this morning - http://bloccatoinlinea.net/

I use Firefox mainly and for me, I get a nice message like this:

Firefox Warns about visiting a Phishing Site

If you get ’straight through’ without any warnings then you need to seriously consider upgrading your browser to FireFox 3 or even the spiffy new Google Chrome.

Is it worth the effort of reporting it?

Trust  me , this isn’t the same as sending an email to abuse@hotwebsites-r-us.cn and hoping that something will happen - this is the real deal - Your submission goes into the Phishing database, people are invited to check your submission and vote on it (for or against) and (assuming it’s approved) one more scam website is defeated!

Once you’ve done it once, you might like to signup and join the band of selfless individuals who monitor, verify and discuss these things (look out for ’scamdex’!).

Good for your sense of moral outrage and good for the general public - help stamp out Phishing - go to Phishtank.com and sign up NOW!

After receiving this email …

Attention:

This email is not in any manner directed to you, but its purposely and specifically directed to Nigeria Scam victims. . However, if you have fallen for Nigerian Scams, do not hesitate to contact us or visit our website for more details on how we can help.

We shall be waiting to hearing from you been certain that you were truly scammed by a Nigerian and you have proves to back your claims. Please read the full report at our website: http://www.nigeria-scamvictims.itgo.com/

Yours faithfully,
Brian Adams
Nigerian Government Reimbursement Committee

I was interested enough to play them along to see where it lead. so I sent this email in reply …

I have been scammed by some Nigerians - they took $30,000 from me - how can I get it back?

Mark

The reply was ….

Dear Mark,

Thank you for responding to our mail, Please find the attached Application Form and fill it appropriately. Please complete the form and return to us for an immediate processing, ensure that you provide sufficient information that might lead to the arrest of the Scam Artist.

Make sure that you attach all necessary proofs, facts and payment receipt made when transacting or communicating with the Scam Artist as this would help us to trace the true identity of the person behind the wall.

Under this act, the Federal Government of Nigeria with an effort to fight internet fraud and other immoral and illegal use of the internet, the government has also complied with the United Nations regulations in a recent meeting held at Abuja, the Federal Capital of Nigeria, to reimburse 150 scam victims. This is done to redeem the image of Nigeria both home and abroad.

We are hopeful that your Application meets the required standard and thus qualify you for the reimbursement which would be done without any problem.

Moreover, ensure that there are no discrepancies in the information you are submitting because we are going to speak with you over the phone and ask you some few technical questions as regards your application in order to authenticate your request.

If you need further assistance, please do not hesitate to contact us, and if you experience some difficulty downloading the Application Form, kindly let us know so that we can resend it in another format or you log on to our website to complete the form.

Yours faithfully,
David Bamko
Anti Nigeria Scams Dept.
www.scamsrefund.org

So, I filled in the form Scams Refund Form and waited …

(more…)

It seems that even ‘those who should know better’ are fair game when it comes to the ubiquitous email scam - lawyers are being targeted for particularly high stakes, on-off counterfeit check scams, solicited via email. The California Bar Journal has provided a nice graphic to show how the scam works.

In a recent example, an unnamed and presumably embarrassed lawyer in California came within a gnats whisker of losing $200,000 when he wired $183,000 to a Hong Kong bank account after receiving a check that his bank

“I feel stupid now that I wire transferred the money before confirming that the check was good,” says the San Francisco attorney, who quickly transferred the client trust account funds because the client said he needed them urgently to pay off a supplier. “I’ve learned to be very careful when I’m contacted by e-mail by potential clients”.

What sets this apart from the simple check scams commonly seen is that the scammers used knowledge of the banking clearing system to their advantage, changing the routing numbers on the check to cause enough confusion for the scam to complete before it was found out. Banks will commonly ‘help out’ trusted lawyers, even advancing large sums of money before checks have had time to clear.  It seems to me some innovation needs to occur in the clearing process worldwide before this type of scam is combated.

Read more here

This just in….

Australian victims of Nigerian online scams are greedy and should be jailed along with the Africans who relieved them of their cash, according to High Commissioner Sunday Olu Agb (Nigerian Envoy to Canberra).

“People who send their money are as guilty as those who are asking them to send the money,”

He said media coverage of Nigerian scams had given the corruption-plagued country “a bad image.” Agbi was responding to a police report that said Australians were losing A$36 Million (about $US 31,000,000) to online scams.

He complained that “those who want to transact business with us are always very suspicious”.

read more in the report by the Sydney Morning Herald

I agree that greed is what drives a large number of scams - as a social engineering construct, it works very well - the knowledge that the actions that they are taking are at best immoral, at worst criminal is normally tempered by the displacement of the crime (eg. another continent) and also the large amounts of money involved and the sense that no-one will ever find out.

When the scam is exposed, the common pattern or events is disbelief, then rage and then either shame/penitence or denial (The Sunk Cost Fallacy?). The last is always the most destructive - This is exploited by scammers who, when the victim has realized his errors, will offer more scams, purportedly to enable the victim to recover some of his lost money. I have seen this many times and the 419 type scammers are the experts at this type of ’scam cascade’.

Greed, Opportunity and Low Risk drives all financial crimes - an email arriving with a request from an African official to help him ‘move’ some money out of his country to yours is just the ‘carrot’ that many people need.

The scam that inspired a poem
WalesOnline - United Kingdom

I JOINED our local OAP group last year and was asked to bring along my favourite poem. Not having an interest in poetry or having a book of poems meant I was in quite a quandary. However, the day before the meeting I received a scam letter, so I wrote this poem:

It’s a Scam

Today I received a letter that contained some very good news,

I’d like to impart its message and ask you for your views.

The letter said that I had won nearly 50,000 pounds.

So why am I suspicious, I surely had no grounds?

The letter came from Holland and it said it was not a joke.

So I’d like to share this fortune with all of you good folks.

They asked me to send them a very little cheque.

I’m writing to thank them, and thought what the heck.

Deduct the £20 I owe – deduct it from the prize.
And send the balance back post haste. I await a big surprise.

DILYS MORGAN, Church Terrace

6 Bay Area Women Arrested In Gift Card Scam
CBS 5 - San Francisco,CA,USA
Sacramento police announced Tuesday the details of a gift card scam that has netted the arrests of six women, some from Richmond in the Bay Area of Northern California, that are allegedly part of an international crime ring.

A group of women, who investigators are calling the “Richmond Girls,” allegedly went on shopping sprees around Northern California, using gift cards with stolen credit card information on them, police said.

Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department Detective Sean Smith said that the women, who targeted stores from Hayward to Roseville in eastern Sacramento County, earned the nickname because all of them are either from or have close ties to Richmond. Smith also said that there’s a “significant number of other suspects we’re attempting to identify” in the investigation.

The women allegedly wired more than $120,000 to various countries in Eastern Europe, where investigators believe individuals paid for the stolen account numbers. Sanna Louise “Shilo” Cross, 23, and Dawn Edward, 31, were arrested on Dec. 30, 2007. Cherice Dempsey, 37, and Melissa Anderson, 29, were both arrested on Jan. 19.

Davina Hollier, 27, was arrested Feb. 19, while Ebony McDowell, 21, the last woman of the group to be arrested, was taken into custody on April 10.

The suspects are being held at the Sacramento County Main Jail, and face more than 180 charges of identity theft and fraud between them. Investigators recovered more than 65 re-encoded gift cards and more than $1 million in fraudulent credit card transactions, along with $45,000 in cash and an estimated $80,000 in merchandise.

The investigation, spearheaded by the Sacramento Valley Hi-Tech Crimes Task Force, is still ongoing, and has involved various police organizations in Northern California, including Richmond police. The U.S. Secret Service also joined the investigation to look into the international aspect of the case.

Scamdex advises all US-based victims of Internet Crime to contact their local Police Unit for  ‘High-Tech’ Crimes.

Scam uses text messages to lure victims
Kentucky.com - Lexington,KY,USA

Last month, hundreds of people in Lexington, KY, received an automated telephone message that states it is from Commonwealth Credit Union and claims the person’s account has been suspended because of suspicious activity. The message told the people to call a phone number, which asked people for bank account numbers. The text message read, “Dear Commonwealth CU Member, Your online account is limited for security purpose.”

The text message asked the person to call a number with a Vermont area code for more information.

Callers told the BBB that an automated message then asks callers to enter their debit or credit card numbers.

Gloria Thomas, the fraud and loss-prevention manager at the credit union, said the credit union isn’t the only place being targeted. But she said last month that the CCU might be targeted because it’s a large