Scum of the Earth - Harvesting Email Addresses for profit

If you ever believed that some people are pure evil shat from the very depths of Hell then I had proof of it today.

Chain emails are a regular thing in my mailbox, and being a bit more IT savvy than most I just ignore them. I'll take the gypsy curses, the bad luck and risk not getting my millions from the widow of a Nigerian Queen to protect the email addresses of my nearest and dearest. Today I received one that turned even my own stomach to the levels of depravity some people will go to make money.

The email was entitled FW: Help find Madeleine McCann and entailed the following heart felt story :

PLEASE READ THIS MESSAGE AND FORWARD IT TO EVERYBODY IN YOUR ADDRESS BOOK...

Please read this message and pass it on!!!!!!!!!

As you are aware my niece, Madeleine, is still missing and I am asking everyone I know to send this as a chain letter i.e. you send it to everyone you know and ask them to do the same, as the story is only being covered in Britain, Eire and Portugal. We don't believe that she is in Portugal anymore and need to get her picture and the story across Europe as quickly as possible. Suggestions are welcome.



Phil McCann

Unfortunately this is not an attempt to find this poor little girl, it is a scam being ran by some very sick individuals, using other peoples pain and the face of something very much in the public eye to harvest email addresses. If there was ever a time to wake up and stop forwarding this kind of email, now was it..


Why is this a scam?

Well for one, if suggestions are welcome, why are there no contact details on the email. They spent the time to get a picture, but Phil McCann who is so desperate for suggestions according to this email forgot to add his own email address and telephone number. There isn't even any of the obvious places to start, including the obvious Portuguese Police/MET Office/Home Office/Child Protection Agencies. There is even an official Find Madeleine website at http://www.findmadeleine.com/ which these douche bags aren't even good enough to make reference to.

This is tried and trusted trick employed by 419 scammers who start most of the shite forwards everyone has seen. The email I received probably had 500 email addresses in it and although most email forwards stay between a "5 hop" social group, eventually someone unwittingly forwards it to a "friend" from MySpace/Yahoo/etc who is actually a 419 scammer in disguise. They then have a nice catch of how ever many hops it took to reach them with X^Y email addresses in and before you can say "No thank you", you are already wanting to buy viagra, inherit Brewsters Millions or you've won the Spanish Lottery and forgot to claim.

The sad truth is some scumfuck is going to make money out of that email, money that most definitely won't go to help find that little girl.


What can I do to stop this?

One thing - STOP FORWARDING EMAILS LIKE THIS! Use a bit of common sense when forwarding anything, including jokes, chain letters, etc. If you are going to forward emails, make sure you actually know every person on your mailing list.

In this case, yes, we all want to find this little girl alive and well (as well as reprimand the parents for their own idiocy, but lets find her before we lay into them..) but it only takes one person to forward that email to a 419 scammer and you've unwittingly exposed a huge quantity of people to potentially get ripped off.

Scam baiting is a technique where the person who was originally sent the email reverses the scam on the send and tries to goad the scammer into wasting their time and sometimes even their money with the false promise of a big return.. in exactly the same way the scam artist was trying it on with them. The law is a bit ropey when it comes to this and it is potentially dangerous so if you are thinking of "prison justice" for these scumbags, you didn't get the idea from me...


Further Reading

For more information about 419 scammers and scambaiting visit http://www.419eater.com and Shiver MeTimbers will give you the lowdown on how they work, and how you can get back at them. I will reiterate his warning that if you're thinking of going after these fuckers, be very, very careful. As my post shows, they really are the Scum of the Earth.