A Good Fake
Here’s a fake email that stands out from the rest. This one is more tightly crafted, showing a better than usual command of the English language. At the first cursory glance, it’s almost believable. But it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. There are just too many mistakes in it to be believed.
Nevertheless, I’d say this guy gets more fish than the average scammer. Let’s check it out. Once again, I have made the pertinent parts BOLD.
POWERBALL LOTTO. BV
POWERBALL-WHEEL E-GAME 2008Dear Consolation Prize Winner,
NOTICE OF CONSOLATION PRIZE WINNING
This email confirms that you have been notified of by the POWERBALL INTERLOTTO BV The Netherlands of your email lottery winning for 2008 PowerballLotto-Wheel E-game held on 2nd January 2008. We wish to congratulate you on the selection of your email coupon number which was selected among the 4 lucky consolation prize winners.
Your email ID identified with Coupon No.PBL2348974321 and was selected by Electronic Random Selection System (ERSS) with entries from the 50,000 different email addresses enrolled for the Lotto-Wheel E-game.Your email ID included among the 50,000 different email addresses where submitted by our partner international email provider companies.For security reasons,you are advised to keep your winning information confidential till your claims is processed and money remitted to you in the manner you deem fit to claim your prize.This is a part of our precautionary measure to avoid unwarranted abuse of this program by some unscrupulous elements.
Prize Ref No.: PBL/CN/6654/CP
Lottery Group: Consolation Prize Group
Prize Amount: US $500,000 Five Hundred Thousand Dollars Only
You are required to file claims for your lottery prize winning by contacting the Lottery Claims Processing Officer with your winning information provided above.
Lottery Claims Officer:
Name: Mrs Stella Coles
Email; stellacoless5@hotmail.com
Tel: +4470-4571-2347
Congratulations once again from all our staffs on your consolation prize winning, we hope you will partake in our forth coming Power ball Lotto-Wheel Email-games.
Yours truly,
Mr.Andrew Patrick,
(Lottery Coordinator)
(Online Promo Programme).
All things considered, this appears to be one of the better scam related emails I’ve ever seen. But once again, since most of these scams originate in other countries, the nuances of English grammar usually give them away. In this one, the space after the comma or period seems to elude our would-be scammer more than anything else. That, and the misuse of “staffs” instead of “staff” (which would be the normal English way of writing that), and the misuse of “forth coming” instead of “forthcoming” and “where” instead of “were”. Notice the noun/verb disagreement in the “claims is” combination. As you can see, these are nuances that many people raised in America or Great Britain might miss. But once again, knowing the grammar saves the day.
Remember that day you looked at the teacher and said, “Why do we have to learn this stuff? What will we ever need to know it for?”, and the teacher didn’t have a good answer? Well, now you know. You needed to learn it to protect yourself from online predators who would steal your identity. Isn’t that a strange twist?
I am Jon, and grammar is my friend.
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I have been recieving these emails a lot lately. How can I put a stop to recieving them.
Sincerly
Tonya
Holydiva1
Thanks for stopping by, and thanks more for asking!
Most of the time, these emails start coming to us because we’ve signed up for some free service online. Most free services, even the legitimate ones, request your email address. An unscrupulous organization will then sell that address to scammers, spammers and other unwelcome folks. The best way to avoid this stuff is to never use your real email address when signing up for services or other web stuff. I have a Yahoo address to use for online sign-ups, which I seldom check.
I wrote a post late last year with some pointers and options on how to control spam in your inbox. Check it out for more information and help.
http://wordout.computergeekservices.net/2007/11/16/spam-control-update/
-jon
I got one of these! They did a good job and believed them! It’s very intricate, but I did think the grammatical errors were strange. So far they haven’t gotten anything from me except my address. Be careful!