The funny side of spamming scammers

[reynardo]

My gmail account is, as you might have guessed, reynardo. I managed to get it early, although I didn't use it for a year or so. (I was not so lucky with Twitter or Skype and a few other things, alas, which is why I'm "Reynardo_Red" in those places instead.)

"Reynardo" is apparently a name in use in Spanish-speaking areas. So obviously other people have tried to get reynardo as their gmail, failed, and are now using reynardoSomethingElse instead.

But they forget.

And they sign up for things and put their email address as reynardo, and then wonder why they don't get the confirmation emails, or the notification for their credit card, or the itinerary for their conference. I do try to contact the email senders for those ones to make sure the details get to the right person.

Now it looks like one of those mistaken locations has been hacked, and their passwords stripped. I have no idea which one it was, but one of these reynardoSomethingElse gmail users put my email instead, and now I've got this from some charming piece of rubbish:

I am aware [redacted Not A Password I use] is your pass words. Lets get directly to the purpose. No-one has compensated me to investigate about you. You do not know me and you're probably wondering why you're getting this e-mail?

[bit I'd never noticed before because it's in white-on-white and it has about 6 other passwords in there. I shall check next time I get one of these emails.]

Well, i setup a malware on the X video clips (pornographic material) web site and you know what, you visited this site to have fun (you know what i mean). When you were viewing videos, your internet browser initiated operating as a Remote Desktop with a keylogger which provided me access to your display screen and webcam.

You get the idea.

Apart from the the face that I always watch my porn from a private protected window I would never watch pr0n, I also have my webcam covered most of the time. I'd know if it was open. But I hope the other Reynardo has the sense that if they get one of these, they change all their passwords.

Comments

[mellotron_breakfast]

Apparently, "dmadeley @ gmail . com" (i.e. mine with the extra stuff omitted) is some guy in Texas named Daniel Madeley or something. There are way more Madeleys in Texas than where I live. Fun fact! Poor guy probably gets a lot of stuff intended for me.

[conuly]

It's so poorly written. Was it typed up in comic sans?

[reynardo]

Almost!

[thewayne]

It's a popular scam to scare people into giving the scammer bitcoins. There are hacker lists that have harvested plaintext passwords along with email addresses, so they just spam those out hoping for people stupid enough or with sufficiently guilty consciences to pay. A return rate of less than 1% but greater than zero is VERY profitable.

The ones that I've seen had my password in the subject line of the email to get attention.

[theweaselking]

Variants on this don't have a password at all, they just change their From address to be the same as yours and are all "Look, I hacked your email, that's why this email came from INSIDE THE ACCOUNT!"

(Meanwhile if you look at the headers you can see the dude just faked the From address and is in Croatia, sending through a French car dealership, to use an example of the breed from YESTERDAY.)

[thewayne]

I've received spam from 'my' email address, haven't yet received the porn blackmail one with that variant.  Pretty trivial mod, but interesting.  Thanks for the info!

[kerravonsen]

What would make this even more laughable for me if I got such an email is, not only do I not watch pr0n, but I don't have a webcam on ANY of my computers.

I feel sorry for all the mistaken mail you're getting, though. I think the only time that happened for me was when there was someone at work whose name was Karl and his last name was almost the same as mine (mine is the Danish spelling, his was the more common English spelling). I would sometimes get emails intended for him.

[austin_dern]

My love has gotten this twice now! The first time around they wanted $848 in bitcoin. The second time it had shrunk to seven hundred something. I'm looking forward to two or three more iterations on, when they'll have gone down to ``whatever's left on this $20 gift card from Borders''.

[reynardo]

*snerk*