Expose:

Idiot Tries to Scam Me, Gets Owned

April 22, 2009 by Kyle Brady
Tags: Craigslist, Ebay, Nigeria, Owned, PayPal, Phishing, Scam, Scammer
As required by the FTC, a Full Disclosure is available - this piece adheres to the Code of Ethics

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After trying to unsuccessfully sell my laptop on Ebay, I resorted to Craigslist, assuming people care more about computers and things on there... I posted it this morning over here.  (Archived version is available in case you're reading this past the expiration date.)

I got an email from a "Tim Cahill" purporting to be interested in buying my laptop and paying via PayPal, all with an email address of 'timcahill09@live.com".  None of this smelled phishy yet.

Then I got emails from "PayPal", where the email address was in quotes, like this:

And when you check the details of the message, you get this:

Obviously that's not from PayPal.

So I checked my PayPal account, just in case I magically had money in it (which I didn't), and my suspicions of a scammer/phisher were confirmed.  But I didn't just get one email from him, I got many.

The best one was when he gave me his address and what I assume is his real name:

For all  you search engines out there, this scammer's/phisher's name and address is:

Bola Adeyemi

8 Alogi Str Obantoko

Abeokuta, Ogun State

Nigeria 23439

Now that I'd discovered it was an attempted scam, I decided to send him back a very nice (and polite!) email saying, and I quote:

Yeah, jackass this isn't going to fly.

I'm not an idiot, unlike you, who apparently are.

I know, I know, great grammar.  I'm usually very well spoken/written... but I was a little annoyed and whipped it off before I could fix it.

As of a few minutes ago, PayPal has been made aware of the situation, along with all the emails to and from him, as well as the faked PayPal emails.  If you're interested in them, I've created a ZIP file of all the fulltext emails for your amusement.

My intent is to spread this around as much as possible, cause this guy much embarrassment and maybe even jail-time (if we're lucky, but that's doubtful).

If we can't get jailtime, I'll settle for something even more gratifying:  his address in Nigeria becoming a hotspot for all sorts of crap, filling his snail-mail inbox like he fills our email inboxes.

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Update (4/28/2009 1:55pm PST): Aparrently they don't learn, because it happened again.

Expose pieces are irregular posts attempting to hold people and organizations accountable for their actions.
Kyle can be found on Twitter and MySpace, or reached via email.