Scam Mail.

Usually I see these letters for international lottery scams for Europe, mailed from Canada, with a check from USA from 1 state and drawn on a bank from another state & address. Then the "winner" gets to wire, Western Union, or Moneygram a portion of the proceeds to someone else in a totally different country.

Another good one is the "secret shopper" work at home type of letter scams.

John's cover strikes me as being potentially
expensive for the scammer. I wonder if the stamp is forged?
If not, it almost guarantees that a certain percentage of
people fall for this deceipt, given the risk to the scammer.
Anyone know the value of the nvi from Belgium?

Thank you 22crows for the info on the stamp in question.

You have a very broad knowledge base in stamping. Thanks for sharing!

419 scam-baiting is a popular computer geek sport. Reply to a scammer, make him waste lots of time doing ridiculous things as he tries to get your money, and then post your trickery to the internet.

http://www.419eater.com/index.php

Here's a particularly famous example - one scam-baiter managed to get these Nigerians to recreate the Monty Python "dead parrot" sketch. ha ha

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-XeFuBGvqs

Ryan

Rodney - the King Albert stamp shown is an Airmail forever stamp for Rest of the World (i.e. outside Europe) 0-50 g normal letter. The current price is euro 1.15 for a single stamp or euro 5.25 for 5 stamps.

Thanks 22crows, expensive for bulk mailing then
if the current amount bandied around is correct say 20,000.
I wonder why the Postal authorities don't question
such bulk mailings.
How did the original Nigerian scam mail ever get into air mail sacks
when they were so blatantly made by photocopier?
Strange that.

I am a little concerned by an e~mail recieved today. It seems someone is trolling the forums for e~mail addresses then sending e~mails out with the stated purpose of initiating friendships. As this purpoted to be from a single woman to a married man with an undeclared but mentioned agenda I am letting other forum members know about it. See for yourselves. What is your opinion about this? A member search didn't turn this person up.:

dearþ
20/10/2010
sarah sarah sarah sarahsarrahbaby200@att.net

Send email
Find email Add to contactsTo sara_tw345@yahoo.ca
From: sarah sarah (sarrahbaby200@att.net)
Sent: Wednesday, 20 October 2010 8:36:44 PM
To: sara_tw345@yahoo.ca


Hi dear,

How are you today? I feel like communicating with you, my name is Miss Sarah , single by marital status, It is my pleasure with due respect to cultivate a healthy friendship with you with since I was impressed with you profile. I have great interest in making new friends, my hobbies are reading, traveling,swimming and dancing.

Today I found your e-mail id in www.stampcommunity.org then I took the opportunity to write to you as I really want us to be good friends, and I will appreciate it if we can can be great friend.

I will send my photo at least for you to see who is writing to you.I will like you to contact me back, so that I will give you full explanation about myself, and reasons and purpose I have contacted you .

Please feel free to write me back in (sara_tw345@yahoo.ca)

I haven't received one (yet).

I don't see how 'she' could have gotten emails without first joining and posting 50 posts? Even then you have to (I think) have a member respond to your email also.

sarah_tw ? TW is the two-letter abbreviation for Taiwan I think.

Perhaps 'she' has just put a couple of hints together from disparate sources and also included the stampcommunity mention to through you off track??

Did the email come through to you as from Stamp Community? Or just to your regular email by itself? Perhaps your web-site email?

Thanks Puzzler!

My wife is not rapped at all about this, she checks everything!
All our children, adult or not and me. There are strict rules here.

The e-mail came through my e-mail address and not straight from SCF.

It is a very strange collection of information.

Such things as this cause so much trouble for me.

My wife is shopping locally at the minuet,
if the e-mail info is not right I will post.

KGV Collector
To bad that Sarah doesn't seem to collect stamps. Probably some foreigner that want to immigrate in to Australia. I know one thing, sometime but rarely I receive émail that is for another person and the email adress is similar. From there your email is known by a complete stranger. One time someone contact me because he receive my émail. Just ignore it.

Thanks timbres667

I just wished that they did not mention SCF!

If there was no mention of SCF there would be no trouble for me!
As you say, just ignore it.

KGV
There's a member who send me an email with the title US Olympics on Stampcommunity. So if the émail goes to the wrong person than the person get to know SCF. Just trying to understand your case... Daniel

The letter was mailed just this year (in 2010). This is a keeper though as most scams right now are sent by email

Hi again,
There are three emails in this correspondence. One from yahoo.ca (Canada! Gads) sara_tw345 and two from ATT (USA ?) sarahbaby200 and sarahsarrahbaby200.

Why three emails? I have never seen that before.

It looks like, to me, that the Yahoo email from Canada has been compromised and these other two from ATT are using it, piggybacking on it so to speak, to send malicious emails.

If you had ever put your email address out in a post on SCF (Maybe do a search and see where you might have done this) it os a good time to edit that post and erase the email, if you had done so.

I think I had told someone my ebay user name but no email, so they contacted me through ebay and not directly to my email. It is nice having a spam filter in a way besides the one on your email. I get enough 'enlarge your anything you want to' emails that go straight into my spam without having the trouble (now) of having to handle each one individually.

There are computer programs that trawl the Internet looking for e-mails (as your email suggests someone did) and uses them to send whatever kind of ads or come ons to entice someone (anyone) to answer. Then, if you do answer, they have a 'live' email and can use it or more likely sell it to lots of other wanna be businesses.

The wonders of the electronic age. Don't tell anyone anything. But then your grand-daughter comes into work one day and uses your computer to play a game on the Internet while you are busy. Suddenly the whole company is full of viruses and the security has been compromised. An inside job.

A thought, do you mention SCF on your own web-site? Perhaps some smart guy thought that hay, here's an email I can use and hmmm, lets mention this forum site too to add authenticity to the email. Then for sure we'll get a response we can is confirmed and a new email we can use. You have to imagine what someone with non-respectful intentions would do. Twists the mind up some days.

No it is not. I get many similar emails, mainly because my email address is on my website. That is the world of spam. In my case, my spam filter snags most of them. And in my case, most of them come from Russia.

I have not received any through SCF. In your case, KGV, perhaps you posted your address on SCF at one time as Puzzler said? Buying and selling email addresses for spammers is a big thing. Who knows, there could be a mole in SCF who does that on the side.

Regardless, as long as you email account has not been hacked, I would not worry about it.