Tired of the scheming, scamming and spamming
Inevitably, when you hang out your virtual shingle on the internet, you’ll subject yourself to people (or their bots) who think it’s great fun to fill your inbox with garbage.
In the last 24 hours, we’ve received about a dozen emails full of gibberish on our contact form. These make me chuckle at least, since I call them “IP removal requests”. (Our contact form lets us know the IP of the originating contact person for just such occasions!). These are pretty innocuous, since it’s just spam. There’s no viruses, but I seriously have to wonder what the purpose of it is. There’s even fake “links” with just strings of letters and ending in .com. So it’s not even trying to get me to go to some lewd site or anything, or try and trick me into submitting credit card info. I’m sure some day when an alien species does some techno-archeological dig, they too will scratch their heads and wonder, “WTF?”
In the last 24 hours we’ve also had a “personal shipping”/”money mule” scam. This is the third time in as many months that someone has tried this on us. It’s rather annoying since we do answer every customer email we get, and the poor English of the first email always makes my spammy-senses tingle, but I do appreciate that not everyone takes the time to write in perfect English. Thus, it usually takes a second email for me to block their IP :P
What is a “money mule” scam you ask? (Well, I actually had to ask too). This link and this one have some good info.
- Basically, someone wants to buy something from you online, and they ask you in really poor English.
- I’ve found that the person usually uses a very common sounding name, like “Joe” and “Janet” and/or “Jane”. In this most recent incarnation, the first emails were signed “Janet” and then switched to “Jane”. They don’t care if you make mistakes on their name, since well, it’s not really their name.
- They always insist that they use their own “personal shipper”. This mystery shipper also cannot be contacted by you directly.
- They refuse to call you, (in the case where we were privately selling a car online, but locally). They also refuse to meet with you.
- I just wonder what the real side of these operations look like. Are they like call centers, but the people are huddled at computers trying to do their little bit of scheming to launder money?
In any event, be forewarned, internet. This was the first time they hit our business website, but the other two “inquiries” were for listings on Kijiji and one on “Used Ottawa”. Oh, and I just remembered this link details a similar scam regarding the online buying of hay bales (! - really? you can buy hay bales online?!). I <3 the internet for quick answers on scams :)
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