Nigerian Scam Moves To Scotland
The Nigerian scam persists, but keeps morphing into new forms. Being in international business, I get deluged by the slimy things and have learned to recognize them. But I saw a new form of the scam this week that is pretty clever.
A friend’s GMail account was hacked and the hacker changed the password, so my friend could not access his account, could not receive email and could make no changes to his account (like changing the password). In the meantime, the hacker sent out the following message to each address in my friend’s GMail address book:
Hello,
How are you doing? Hope all is well with you and family, I know this might be a surprise to you but I am sorry I didn’t inform you about my traveling to Scotland for a Seminar.
I need a favor from you because I misplaced my wallet on my way to the hotel, my money and other valuables are gone including my credit cards. I will like you to assist me with an urgent loan of £1,500 British Pounds to sort-out my hotel bills and get myself back home. This is one favor I will show gratitude throughout my lifetime.
I will appreciate whatever you can afford to help me with and I promise to refund the money as soon as I return home. Please do this for me and I will be grateful. Let me know if you can help me out so I can send you the details for making a transfer through Western Union.
Regards
The message comes from a trusted address and is signed with the friend’s first name. Be warned.
- Doesn’t look like Nigeria, does it?
So what did he do about it? He went to Google and found he couldn’t contact a human. He found a form to fill in when you suspect your account has been hijacked and, last I heard, was still waiting for a response from Google. I found him an obscure Google customer service number (which does NOT appear on the GMail help pages). He is still trying to sort things out and recover control of his email account.
He filed a report with his local police, who were moderately interested. And he called Western Union (mentioned in the scam message) to ask them to block money transfers in his name. WU wasn’t interested in the slightest, telling him that there could be many people with his name and they weren’t going to turn away business.
I’ve got three takeaways from this. The scammers will never give up (there are too many gullible people out there). Each of us, especially if your line of work attracts international attention, needs to use hard passwords for any vital account. And Google (or other email providers) need to establish crisis centers staffed by humans who know how to handle such things. It may not be a crisis to Google, but it certainly is a crisis to whoever gets hacked and exposes friends and business contacts to a scam.
