Thursday, August 6, 2009

All I Wanted Was a Date

We've been seeing a lot of 419 scam emails posing as various things the past couple of weeks. We had them posing as Dilbert cartoons, TED talks, Kid Rock Fan Club emails. All of them using a template of sorts to make them initially appear as the aforementioned, but instead underneath it all they were 419s. Today we started seeing another version of these poseur scams, though not quite as flashy.
These were pretending to be email response to Yahoo! personals. Having never signed up for or received a response from Yahoo! personals, I can only speculate to the fact that these were set up to mimic what an actual reply to a personal ad would look like. These are complete with formatting such as the senders email address, which of course is a Yahoo! address, as well as Yahoo footers. One of the footers, which varied in each, is specific to Yahoo! personals. It contains tips for dating as told by the Yahoo! staff. It's a one line sort of topic, which is repeated in the email's subject line, and it includes a link to the actual Yahoo! site containing more advice on the subject.
Be careful not to fall for any of these wolves in sheep's clothing scams, even if your potential date comes with $30 million dollars.

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