Posted on 03/14/2011 12:30:06 PM PDT by Leo Carpathian
Please alert your friends.
People on my contact list got this about a year ago. Took me forever to get back into the account. They also got into my FB page. It was someone in Nigeria.
The disturbing thing was that it was sent from another friend's account which had been hacked. A few calls to the family of the supposed victim quickly revealed the scam attempt.
Yes I got one of these as well from what appeared to be a friend of mine. The reason I new it was fraud was because my friend is a Navy Seal Commander.
The line about tears in my eyes LOL right - not very likely. And Mugged? probably not.
I called the guy and told him his hotmail account had been hacked and some creep was trying to scam his friends list in his name.
Most of these are not that hard. No personal contact (at least phone), no money.
And use the resources at hand to investigate. This scam is at least two years running.
http://www.cleveland.com/consumeraffairs/index.ssf/2009/04/facebook_scam_friend_stuck_in.html
This one is well known. Because they use your real friend’s info, some of these scams must be successful or they wouldn’t keep trying it.
My friends have average intelligence and wouldn’t fall for something like this.
Just another in a long list of reasons NOT to join Facebook and other so-called “social media.”
>> Writing and punctuation are a bit off.
Duh, yeah... in a Nigerian sort of way.
I replied "I am here"
Almost immediately got back "My family and I are in terrible trouble".
Now I know this woman is well off and takes flying lesson for example. I also know she is currently visiting family in Palm Spring. On top of that I am the most casual of friends (we belong to one common organization, but different clubs).
Given this, I was pretty sure it was a fake, so I simple saved a screen shot of our supposed chat and emailed her immediately. Of course, she was fine and appalled. I just told her to change her facebook password.
I guess for all of you, never believe anything sent to you on the internet. Always verify in person. For example you could have asked for the name of the Hotel in London and called them and asked to speak to your friend.
I am guessing the Navy Seal Commander isn’t the “sensitive” type?!
Our grand daughter lives about 60 miles from us, and we got a call saturday: This is xxx, I’m in trouble, I need help.
My wife had answered the phone: Where are you xxx, “I’m in Mexico. I need help.”
We are at least five hundred miles from Mexico, and the voice didn’t sound quite right.
“Grandmother, I need help”.
That did it, because the word is Nana.
Lot’s of scams going around.
Honest truth - I have an friend (an American) who WAS mugged in London a number of years ago. FWIW.
London England for a short vacation and i was mugged at gun point
Don’t ever click on links from sites you don’t know — particularly when they have some odd extensions (instead of .com or .org they might have .sk for example). I use facebook and there are a number of spammers posting advertising for this and that — such as free Ipads. You don’t get the free Ipad, but what happens is that the spammer can hack into your facebook account (or your email account if you opened the link from your junk mail). Then the spammer starts sending out email and posting to facebook under your name. Even worse, some hackers have been able to tap into your personal information, and if you have any identifying information in your email or facebook account (Social Security or credit card numbers for example), you are screwed. Get some good software that will prevent you from opening unsafe links and do your part by not clicking on links or opening email from anyone you don’t know.
They do strike gold from time to time.
Woman out $400K to 'Nigerian scam' con artists (Investigator: Worst example of scam he's seen)
Same thing happened to me, someone hacked my Facebook account and started sending messages to my friends and family on there, saying I was stuck in London with no money. Luckily I was at work at the time, so when my mom and sister called there I answered the phone and told them I was obviously fine. I put an immediate alert to all other friends and family that I had been hacked, luckily none of them fell for it. Dirty scammers.
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