Another Idiot Scammer [Expose]

Kyle Brady — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 20:54:50 +0000

I've already pointed out that most scammers aren't that intelligent, and it's easy to avoid being "caught" by them. But I got another email thread that started just a day after the last one, with an entirely different person... this one pretends to be more legitimate for awhile, and ends up being amusing. This one got reported to PayPal as well.

There were a few main differences between the last scammer and this one, so here's the highlights:

a different address (potentially the equivalent of a P.O. Box?)... here it is for all you search engines:
ADEBAYO ADEOLA
C.A.C OKE-AYO AKURO IBADAN
CITY: IBADAN
STATE: OYO
COUNTRY: NIGERIA WEST AFRICA

After telling "her" that I'm not going to fall for a retarded scam attempt, she replies "okay am not like that am a beautiful lady/////"... I'm not sure what all the slashes are for.

I then call her out on how that's not even relevant, receiving a reply of "okay but when are you going to ship the gods when i do the transfer now"... as if she's afraid I won't send her the laptop.

I reply that I will ship as soon as my PayPal account has the correct balance...

And don't hear from her again.

A day later, I decide to poke her another time and see if I can get a rise out of it (to no avail):

What, you're not interested anymore?

Maybe because you're not a real buyer, and are, in fact, a scammer from Nigeria?

Oh, surprise. I bet the fact that you can barely speak English and told me you were in Nigeria didn't give it away at all...

I should sell on Craigslist more often, so I get more of these emails - they're very entertaining!

I've provided a ZIP file of the emails for your amusement.

Idiot Tries to Scam Me, Gets Owned [Expose]

Kyle Brady — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 01:08:06 +0000

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.

Kyle Brady: Blog » Craigslist

Another Idiot Scammer [Expose]

Idiot Tries to Scam Me, Gets Owned [Expose]