New kind of scam

Got this this morning from one of my customers in St. Thomas, USVI-

Hope you get this on time, sorry I didn't inform you about my trip to the UK for a program, I'm presently in Nottingham & I am having some difficulties here because I was robbed of my wallet and other valuable things on my way to the hotel. I want you to please assist me with a loan of £1900 to sort out my hotel bills and to get myself back home. I have spoken to both the embassy & police here but they are not responding to the matter effectively, I will appreciate whatever you can afford to assist me with, I'll refund the money back to you as soon as I return, let me know if you can be of any help. I don't have a phone where i can be reached so please email me

Immediate Red Flags- I spoke to him yesterday, in St. Thomas. His grammar and spelling are no where as good as the e-mail. Called him this morning, he already knew about it. Apparently somebody hacked his e-mail account and sent this out to everybody.. Clever.

That one has been going on for some time. I got one a few years ago supposedly from a friend who had been robbed in England, when I knew she was at home.

A friend of mine had that scam happen to her. She found out about it from her friend, while they were having lunch and the friend got the email while they were waiting for the check.

Here I thought it was something new!

Yep, I've gotten one of those before as well. Funny thing is when I told my contact that their account was hacked, they said "oh yeah, we know about that". Apparently they didn't think it was important to notify anyone in their address book that it was assuredly a scam. I can only hope some of their less internet-age savvy relatives didn't get ripped.

Wow, I'd like to have friends I can e-mail (scam or not) and ask for....with the expectation of receiving, $3K from them.

I can't even get my family to fork over a few hundred if I'm standing there asking...much less via an e-mail. (Not sure what that says about me and / or my family.)

Does your friend usually refer to money in euros?

not euros.. Pounds

cwh wrote: Apparently somebody hacked his e-mail account and sent this out to everybody.. Clever.

Not likely. That's a common misconception and almost never the case.

Spoofing the return address of an email is as easy as it is to spoof the return address on a piece of postal mail.

I see people all the time that think their email account got hacked, when all it is is bot-net spam spoofing their account as the sending address and inserting a different REPLY-TO: header.

Does your friend usually refer to money in Pounds?

I have received this twice, both from friends with GMail accounts and the scammer in most cases sits with the account open, and I have GChatted with them before. My friend who is actually from London played him up and asked where he was staying to wire the money close by and the scammer gave the Prime Minister's address, which to the English is quite as recognizable if I had said I was at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue...

ReverendDexter wrote:

cwh wrote: Apparently somebody hacked his e-mail account and sent this out to everybody.. Clever.

Not likely. That's a common misconception and almost never the case. Spoofing the return address of an email is as easy as it is to spoof the return address on a piece of postal mail.

QFT

BTW...with this title, I expected the thread to be about marriage.