OT: I Have Won!!!

[Raging Deadstar]

Atrocities said:
...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?

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

[Atrocities]

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

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.

[Fyron]

Atrocities said:
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?

Let evolution take its course and get the scum out of the gene pool?

[Gandalf Parker]

Atrocities said:

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.

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.

[Sivran]

You fool, you passed up a chance at riches!

[narf poit chez BOOM]

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

[Atrocities]

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.

[Baron Munchausen]

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.

[Baron Munchausen]

Yep, I got those Washington Mutual PHISHING scams, too. Apparently our emails are in the same scammers' list... 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.

[DeadZone]

I did hear that the FBI are investigating some email scams