Nigerian scammer gets a laptop from me
1–10 of 146 posts
Re: Nigerian scammer gets a laptop from me
#2Nice job there. It is easy to forget though that we're all pretty tech savvy here on hacker news. There's a ton of people out there that would see that government logo and get all panicked and confused.
Even a good high school friend of mine who never got very good at computers (he's a butcher) fell for a Nigerian scam. Thankfully he was only out a couple of hundred bucks, but damn, we need a way to stop it.
Re: Nigerian scammer gets a laptop from me
#3This can go badly of course, taunting crooks is never the safe policy no matter how tempting it can be. The thing is, they are crooks, so they have already decided that they are willing to break the rules, what you don't know is how many they are willing to break.
Re: Nigerian scammer gets a laptop from me
#4Hilarious. But it sucks that the author draws this conclusion:
"If people in the U.S. aren’t suspicious of free money, PayPal payments that look fake, [...], or just Nigerians in general, then they deserve to have their money taken from them."
I feel like we need a tumblr to post blatantly obvious scams like these. Maybe that would help the common folk be better at identifying them.
Re: Nigerian scammer gets a laptop from me
#5Don't the scammers often use the victimized sellers as drop shippers?
Say, Alice lists a laptop on eBay or Craigslist. The scammer has also listed a similar model for sale, and Bob has purchased it in what he believes to be a legitimate transaction.
Scammer "buys" it from Alice, with either fraudulent funds from a stolen card (that would get charged back eventually) or just delivering a forged paypal mail. Or the famous "P-p-p-p-p-owerbook"[1] scam involved a fake escrow service. The scammer has Alice ship the laptop to Bob.
Alice is out a laptop, Bob gets a laptop, scammer gets Bob's money.
[1] http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=101...
Re: Nigerian scammer gets a laptop from me
#6More records of people baiting Nigerian scammers: http://419eater.com/html/letters.htm. People on http://www.419eater.com/ lead these “4-1-9” scammers on wild goose chases deliberately to waste their time, in the hopes of distracting them from attacking other people and also just having fun.
Re: Nigerian scammer gets a laptop from me
#7Incidentally, those laptops are pretty good: I got one years ago when Dell was offering Ubuntu, and we still use it for my daughter. The battery is pretty much toast, but otherwise (fingers crossed) it's still going strong.
Re: Nigerian scammer gets a laptop from me
#8Very (probably unintentionally) similar to: http://www.zug.com/pranks/powerbook/
Re: Nigerian scammer gets a laptop from me
#9[deleted]
Re: Nigerian scammer gets a laptop from me
#10Nice job there. It is easy to forget though that we're all pretty tech savvy here on hacker news. There's a ton of people out there that would see that government logo and get all panicked and confused. Even a good high school friend of mine who never got very good at computers (he's a butcher) fell for a Nigerian scam. Thankfully he was only out a couple of hundred bucks, but damn, we need a way to stop it.
> Even a good high school friend of mine who never got very good at computers (he's a butcher) fell for a Nigerian scam.
Please don't insult butchers. Not falling for a Nigerian scam has nothing to do with "[being] good at computers". It requires nothing more than the level-headed application of logic and reason.