After getting the email scam from Amazon a couple weeks ago, today I got a scam mail sent from Canada by a company called “Inter-state marketing ltd” trying to jack my money! It comes with a $3995.00 check for me to deposit. I was surprised about it since it doesn’t look like those from the credit card company which don’t really pay. Then I opened the letter to check it out. It has a U.S. address in the header and it is from a company called “Inter-State Marketing Ltd.,” which I have never heard of. It also says that I have applied their “Customer Service Evaluator” position, which I have never been aware of either. It basically tells me to deposit $3415.00 to Western Union plus the service charge $170.00 WITHIN 48 hours, and it “pays” the rest $410.00 to me. It sounds too good to be true. After I do that I have to call a number with area code 905 (which is a Canadian number) and give them the MTCN number. WTH? That’s obvious telling me to give the money to them, because I have sent money to others this way before! What if the check is a bad check and it bounces back after they jacked the money? The letter also tell me to fill out the customer evaluation form and the schedule request sheet (which was missing in the mail) and fax it back to their office. I didn’t try it because it is too likely to be scam and I don’t want to risk it.
The mail is obvious from Canada because it has Canadian address and postage plus a Canadian phone number to reach back. Also on the check it has both English and French on the back, which tells me that the check must be from Canada, while it has U.S. bank addresses in the front!
Does anybody have similar experience of getting such scam mail?
images of the mail:
Before I have listed the phone HTC 8525 for sale in Amazon.com, one day I got an email saying that I have sold the phone and I have to ship it to 16 Razaq Balogun Street, a place in Surulere, Nigeria. The email asked for international express mail so that they can get it by next Wednesday and it gives me about forty bucks of shipping credit for me to ship, it also claims that it has like thousands of deposits on Amazon.com for purchase protection (something which Amazon.com never has). At first I thought it was true and I took my phone to USPS to ship without checking amazon first, and the postage was only $34 and I thought I would make ten buck more out of the shipping credit this time.
Continue reading Amazon scam from Nigeria →
I got a phishing spam PayPal email that mimics the address services.paypal.com in my Gmail account, with title “Notification of Limited Account Access,” and a url that asks me to verify my paypal account but pointing to http://www.soios.com/matiz/varios/www.paypal.com/ssl/, which is not paypal’s website. It’s actually from servidor01.mimela.com, not paypal’s server. Here’s part of the heading of the email from the original message, which can be seen in GMail by clicking the arrow next to the reply button and then click “Show original.”
Received: from servidor01.mimela.com ([64.22.85.7])
by mx.google.com with ESMTP id 26si58691192wrl.2006.12.03.18.12.08;
Sun, 03 Dec 2006 18:12:08 -0800 (PST)
Received-SPF: softfail (google.com: domain of transitioning [email protected] does not designate 64.22.85.7 as permitted sender)
Received: from soios by servidor01.mimela.com with local (Exim 4.52)
id 1Gr3KQ-000599-7W
for [email protected]; Mon, 04 Dec 2006 03:13:10 +0100
Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1"
............
Message-Id:
Date: Mon, 04 Dec 2006 03:13:10 +0100
X-AntiAbuse: This header was added to track abuse, please include it with any abuse report
X-AntiAbuse: Primary Hostname – servidor01.mimela.com
X-AntiAbuse: Original Domain – gmail.com
X-AntiAbuse: Originator/Caller UID/GID – [32705 32706] / [47 12]
X-AntiAbuse: Sender Address Domain – paypal.com
X-Source:
X-Source-Args:
X-Source-Dir:
Here’s the picture of the email (click for original size):
One day in a forum I saw a website http://www.url-xp.com/ that “pays” $2.00 per 1000 impression + Pop-under, so I gave it a try to see if it works. I went to sign up there and I saw a very simple page where you can put the paypal email address or e-gold account there, but surprisingly there’s no Term of Use or anything like that there.
After signing up I put a website there and I tested the money link that “pays” $2 per 1000 impressions. Surprisingly it counts all visits including my own repeated visits, I wasn’t sure if it really pays because those websites that pays per impression almost always doesn’t count the visits from the same IP immediately, so I refreshed the money link 1015 times, and it showed about $2 there.
After three weeks I still didn’t get anything in my paypal, I check it again and the website still shows the two dollars there, except now it says minimum payout is $50. After seeing that I gave it one more try and added one more url to auto-refresh. I auto-refreshed every 3 seconds for one whole night until I wake up and see the balance went up above $50, after this the page still looks the same as before except for the balance. I checked it out after some weeks and it’s still the same, I still didn’t get anything paid for it. Now I check it again and the website is gone! I went to look at its domain registration data at GoDaddy.com and it says domain suspended because of abuse: http://who.godaddy.com/whois.aspx?domain=URL-XP.COM&prog_id=godaddy.
here’s the picture of the $50.153 they owe me, it seemed to be gotten effortlessly, but it’s never paid:
Tips and tricks and tech thoughts for computers, internet, and mobile.
