bogus emails looking for money

[Ken D'Ambrosio]

Wups!  Mea culpa -- clearly, that wasn't the case, as the e-mail
originated from someone you knew.  In which case, it was probably a weak
password crack.  I, myself, got bitten by that using what *I*, at least,
thought was a fairly esoteric password.  But my account provider ran the
couple-million passwords[1] against all the accounts, and disabled the
accounts that had hits, and lo!  Mine was one of 'em.


[1] 32 million passwords stolen: http://tinyurl.com/3xwg2lm

Do bear in mind that it's insanely easy to forge "from" headers; unless
they actually ask you to respond to the e-mail address, I'd even put that
down as most-likely hypothesis, barring contradictory evidence in the
headers.




> I guess law-enforcement is not nimble enough to deal with these kinds of
> hoaxes.

Sadly, the general rule is they don't get involved until there's
significant loss incurred.  That's not dyed in the wool, but they simply
don't have anything like the resources to go after every phishing attack,
419 scammer, "lottery winner," etc.  Especially since a non-trivial number
of these originate from overseas.  The Interwebtubes(tm) sure is a great
thing, but it also makes scammers w-a-y more able to get around.

$.02,

-Ken

>
>
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