Cybercrime and Punishment

My email provider does a decent enough job of filtering out spam, but occasionally one does slip through. Recently I got this one, allegedly sent by someone named "guido rub" (perhaps a protege of e. e. cummings):

333

I visited the company original products . such as the European version, American version, and the Asian version and so on. . I suggest you should have a look in this website w w w , e l e t e t , c o m,
If it is suitable for you you can contact them :
Email: poLoao2009 @ 188 . com

♀▲

These spam messages completely mystify me. How, and why, would anyone take this seriously, let alone get hoodwinked by one of these spam-based scams? It seems to me that if one is going to go to the trouble to commit some kind of Internet fraud, one should not lead off with a message as weird-looking as this one.

There's the "333" in the first line. What does that mean? Is the alleged guido addressing me as "333"? Is it some kind of reference code? Is it one half of the mark of The Beast and if so, what does that signify? Apparently some sort of "original products" are being recommended here, but there are no clues as to what they might be. There's fractured English and random punctuation. There's a web site address that has commas where periods (or "dots") belong, and it's full of spaces, so if you click on it, it won't link to anything. The email address is similarly invalid. And what are the mysterious symbols at the end of the message trying to tell me? This hardly seems like a promising ruse for establishing a trusted commercial relationship.

Against my better judgment, I decided to have a look at http://www.eletet.com/ just to satisfy my curiosity. I know this is not exactly good computer hygiene, but I decided to trust the antivirus software on my computer to protect me. I do not recommend that you visit this or any other site advertised in an email that comes from someone you've never heard of, so if you want to visit this site, do so at your own risk; you didn't hear about it from me. I'll tell you what I found so you don't have to go there yourself. I'm doing this all in the name of science.

Basically, I found a reasonably-done web site offering mostly electronics along with some motorcycles and other small motor vehicles. And what deals!

There's a Honda CBR 1000RR motorcycle priced at $2,284. According to Motorcycle.com, MSRP for the 2010 model year is $13,399.



I can get an Apple MacBook Pro MC226LL for $1,246. Amazon.com says the list price was (since this model has been discontinued) $2,199.





If I knew how to play the bass, I'm sure I'd be excited to find this Fender Deluxe Active Jazz Bass for only $208. J&R Music World wants around $699.


Funny thing though—that picture above is from the www.eletet.com site. But J&R thinks the Fender Deluxe Active Jazz Bass looks like this:

Hmm… typical Fender bass body shape? Trademark Fender headstock shape (with "Fender" logo decal)? Nah, those J&R guys probably don't know what they're talking about.

I compared a few other prices on the www.eletet.com site with, er, more mainstream sites and found pretty much what you'd expect on all of them, i.e., they're way below what everyone else is charging for the same item. This comparison shopping was made somewhat tedious by the fact that most of the merchandise for which I was doing price comparisons seemed to consist of discontinued models. If I wanted to be charitable I might speculate that this site has somehow found a way to buy up discontinued merchandise really cheaply and can therefore offer it at terrific prices. But I'm not feeling charitable today. The fact that you have to pay for all of this stuff by bank transfer rather than with a credit card should also be a gigantic red flag for anyone who's ever bought anything online. I guess that somehow there are still people out there who fall for these scams, so there's enough of a potential payoff to make it worthwhile to create this moderately elaborate hoax web site and then arrange to spam mailboxes to advertise for it.

Looking at this I was reminded of an episode of one of my favorite radio shows, This American Life. You can find said episode in the TAL archive at http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/363/enforcers. Skip over the five-minute intro story if you want and go straight to "Act One: Hanging in Chad". It's a sordid tale of some guys who turn the tables to scam a scammer who's trying to perpetrate one of those frauds that begins with an email from Nigeria promising vast wealth with the catch that you have to put up some money of your own first. They send the scammer on a fairly elaborate wild goose chase; he patiently jumps through all of the increasingly absurd—and increasingly dangerous—hoops they put in his way in the expectation that there'll be a big payoff at the end.

The perpetrators of this "anti-scam" have a scambaiting web site where you can read more about this story and many more. A Google search on "scambaiting" will also turn up tons more material on this interesting hobby.

The TAL story also mentions a "scambaiting" action in which an Internet scammer is induced to reenact the entire Monty Python dead parrot sketch, and as it turns out, he and his partner do a fairly creditable job, so I think I will leave you with that. The original Monty Python sketch, if you want to do a comparison, is also somewhere on YouTube but I will leave searching for that as an exercise for the reader.

Parrot Sketch, Nigerian style