OT: I Have Won!!!
 

According this bogus email, I have won a lottory or something. How dumb do they think we are. If people are stupid enough to fall for this crap, well, they deserve to get ripped off.

Re: OT: I Have Won!!!
 

Well AT, I can just see it now,.. you send them an e-mail and say they need your bank account info in order to transfer the funds. then they send you an authorization form and way down in the fine print it says you authorize them to not only deposit, but withdraw as needed. Or they say something really stupid.. Sir we need your credit card info in order to confirm your identity. Duh? a credit card is not a piece of identification.

LoL, these type of things are always going around. Trust me, if you won there would be a registered letter notifying you and they don't need bank or credit card info to issue a check. But if they issue a check to "Atrocities" could you cash it? LOL

This is almost too funny.

Have a great day, Cheers! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: OT: I Have Won!!!
 

Lol, Atrocities. I thought for one moment you had a big Luck payoff and something really good had happened!!! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif Dam my optimism http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif

Re: OT: I Have Won!!!
 

http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif Something good did happen. I did not fall for this scam. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: OT: I Have Won!!!
 

The scam that pisses me off lately is that many of my domains are coming up for re-registering. Im getting emails that are reminding me to renew and re-register them. The emails read just fine. If I wasnt REAL careful to take note of the fact that they are NOT coming from my registrar. They are coming from other registrars and if I hit the link and "renew" I will actually be switching companies.

Im geting the same thing on the phone lately because of my house mortgage. If I dont SPECIFICALLY ask them "we have an account with you now?" then nothing they say gives any impression that they arent the company you are already with and their offer of "upgrading your account to the new rates" is actually trying to get you to switch.

I feel this pretend-you-are-with-us-already tactic is deplorable for a company to use. OK it is legal but I would be ashamed to work for a company that uses it.

Re: OT: I Have Won!!!
 

I took a call like that Last year just after I listed my house. My house, to think I actually owned a house. Well any ways, I had to laugh. I made a lot of money off the sale, and am thankful it sold in fast, but in retrospect, I should not have sold it. I paid $112.500 for it new, actually was there every day it was being built, and sold it for $149.500 five years later. To get into a house like that again, would cast me $175.000 now. Go figure. Any who, I hear ya GP, tis annoying as all hell, but even those low life SOB's have to put food on the table for their families, so they inconvience us to do it. What can ya do?

Re: OT: I Have Won!!!
 

Ask them for a cheque to "verify their identity" http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: OT: I Have Won!!!
 

Actually a credit card CAN be used as a piece of ID. The airlines do it now for example (and no, it wasn't the card used to pay for the flight).

Not that this isn't a scam. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif

Re: OT: I Have Won!!!
 

IF I had won, then the inorbit.com site would be real. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif Also the information about signing up for their hosts email service was a dead give away. Duhhhhhhhhhhhh

Just once I would like to meet up with one of the people behind these scams and beat them to near death with a wooden bat. Then just for good measure, tie em to a concrete block and drop em in the river. If they float, then they live, if not, well.... who'd miss em?

Re: OT: I Have Won!!!
 

I had a coworker who just fell for the eBay account scam. Social Security, debit card number, everything.

Re: OT: I Have Won!!!
 

Interesting Theory, So you're proposing that witches from medieval days decided to gain revenge upon the masses by using these unholy scams, I always suspected that there was some evil afoot when people fell for these. Very interesting http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: OT: I Have Won!!!
 

Oh man, those kind of scams are far harder to detect and a lot easier to fall for. If not for the fact that I did not have an account with Washington Mutual, I too may have fell for a simular scam.

I guess the crux of the situation would be to consider every email suspect until proven lagit.

I hope your co-worker was able to change everything before they could act upon the information they were deceived into providing.

Re: OT: I Have Won!!!
 

Let evolution take its course and get the scum out of the gene pool? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif

Re: OT: I Have Won!!!
 

Whenever a thread breaks out about how to tell if its real or not I tell people DONT TRY TO TELL. Yes I can still read the headers and spot the falsehood in it because I fairly well know http protocol. But they do get harder and harder to spot. So my stance is NEVER click an email link for things like that. Always go manually to the site and look for the link you need.

For that matter conisder it for phone calls also. You should have a rule that you never give ANY personal information to anyone who calls you. You should manually look up the number and call the company.

Re: OT: I Have Won!!!
 

You fool, you passed up a chance at riches! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: OT: I Have Won!!!
 

All lottories are scams. X number of people pay Z amount of money and one person gets Z/2.

Re: OT: I Have Won!!!
 

Ever wonder what they mean by "validating" the numbers? What they mean by that is that they already know what numbers are going to win, via a computer generated algorythm designed to drive up the amount of money people pay each week to win the jack pot. (IE if you win a million dollar Jackpot every week less and less people are going to play. But if the jack pot is 11 million, well then people feel lucky and buy more tickets.)

The numbers do not change after they have been chosen. Knownone othe than the Lottory offical knows the number that is going to win before the balls are dropped. The balls are weighted in such a way that only the numbers that have been chosen will come up. They cannot, or at least could not, determine the way the chosen balls would be chosen, but they knew which balls would be chosen over all.

When they validate the numbers, they are doing two things, one verifying that the balls have not been tampered with, and verifying that the number the computer chose to win was the number that came up.

Now on rare occations the computer has determined that the number it chose had already be bought so they changed the number to drive up the jack pot.

Lottery winers do not get all the money at one time. The state keeps the money and draws interest off the money. The lottery winner does not get interest on the money they have won. In fact, they pay a higher tax rate on the money than someone like bill gates would pay on an equal amount. It really is a sick industry that we are talking about here.

It may pay to win the lottery but it never pays what you win.

Re: OT: I Have Won!!!
 

You need to read the 'raw' message to get the headers and see where it really came from. Then report this to BOTH the service listed for the contact address and the service it actually came from. I've been getting these for months now. Someone or other got my email and added it to a list apparently passed among several scammers. 419 scams (need to recover money from some account in Nigeria), 'Inheritance with no known heir' scams, 'European lottery' scams, and several other creative variations. Many of them using Yahoo email addresses for the contact. I always, always report them to Yahoo because Yahoo is very quick and direct about shutting them down. I hope they are also referred to relevant law agencies, but I don't know for certain about that. And if I can figure out the point of origin I report the scam there as well. Problem is, many of these scammers use 'webmail' services, meaning there is no 'account' to terminate.

Re: OT: I Have Won!!!
 

Yep, I got those Washington Mutual PHISHING scams, too. Apparently our emails are in the same scammers' list... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif I immediately forwarded them to the abuse address at Washington Mutual so they would be aware of what was going on as quickly as possible. I hope they catch some of those weenies and give them hard time.

Re: OT: I Have Won!!!
 

I did hear that the FBI are investigating some email scams

Re: OT: I Have Won!!!
 

Yes, but the FBI would rather we not know that. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

Re: OT: I Have Won!!!
 

It is now December. I get to collect the yearly $500.00 I "Won" at the lottery. It is $10 for each week that I did NOT buy lottery tickets! It is tax free as well!

The best way to double your money is fold it and put it back in your pocket.

Re: OT: I Have Won!!!
 

Some? What is 'some'? I just reported THREE MORE email scams to Yahoo. THREE in the same day. I suspect it's the same person using the same list to send out different scams hoping he'll someday manage to fool someone or other. Of course, the origin point for all of the emails, despite the listed return address @yahoo.com, is in Europe. But this is getting a bit ridiculous. If an obscure person like me is getting three of these a day it must be a pandemic and the FBI had better be investigating it. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/eek.gif