Spam email: Red Flags

Other than a SPAM: alert that may be provided by your email software, how can you tell this message isn't real?

Good Day,

My name is Mrs Linda Walker and I work with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), I am writing you to let you know that finally your ATM Card worth $650,000.00 USD has been delivered through UPS to Mr Hart Leroy, who works with the IMF where it is going to be activated before final delivery to your home address. You can use the tracking number with the tracking site below to track the ATM Card to be sure it has been delivered to Mr Hart for activation.

UPS Tracking number: 1z2876490390947593
UPS tracking site: http://wwwapps.ups.com/WebTracking/track

Below is the contact information to Mr Hart Leroy

Contact Name: Mr Hart Leroy
Contact E-mail: hart.leroy.office@gmail.com
Contact Number: +1 347 298 9752

You are to contact Mr Hart with his email address above then he will guide you on how your Card will be activated and delivered to your home address.

Note: The only fee you are to send for the activation fee is just $280 USD so make sure you don’t send him more than $280 USD. Your card is already with him and you can track it with the tracking details given to you above for confirmation.

Congratulations once more.

Best Regards,
Mrs Linda Walker
International Monetary Fund (IMF)

Before sending in $280 to activate this card, how can you check its validity? Here are some Red Flags:

On the surface,

Too good to be true: Experience teaches that few things in life are free.
It costs something: Be wary when a stranger asks for money.
It sounds complicated: Why would the IMF send a card to someone else at IMF that you have to contact? Why not just send you the card?

Below the surface,

Sender: If you look closely at the sender's email address you'll find this: "International Monetary Fund (IMF)" info@sender.org.   IMF actually uses this email: @imf.org, which can be found on their Website.  
No Data Found: If you look up whois.net registration information for sender.org, you won't find any. It appears to be a smoke screen.
Third Party Review: Copy the first phrase of the email: "My name is Mrs Linda Walker and I work with the International Monetary Fund (IMF)" and google it. There is an exact match from antifraudintl.org › Scam Mail Depot › Government scams.

There may be more Red Flags, but it's clear that this is not going to result in your receipt of an ATM card.

Have students identify Red Flags -- what others can they find?

Information Fluency Doesn't Stop With Retrieval

Looking for a hallmark case of consuming unreliable information?

The company that NYC hired to clean up the ebola-infected apartment of a Dr. there turned out to be a scam. Here's a sample article from the Daily News: http://www.dailynews724.com/politics/how-new-york-city-hired-a-con-artist-to-clean-up-ebola-h309372.html

Once information is obtained, by retrieval, observation, word of mouth, etc., it's very tempting to treat it as reliable. In this case, the company's Chief Safety Officer surrounded himself with media to make it appear he was trustworthy.

It always pays to fact check.

How about googling the Chief Safety Officer's name and the name of the company?  Had someone queried

sal pane biorecovery

before the problems finally became public there wouldn't be a long history of the company. Yet Mr. Pane made the following claim: "For the past 27 years the company’s been around..."

The red flag that prompted suspicion came when officials identified Mr. Pane as a convicted felon. Another red flag: The company appears to have been in existence for 16 years.

Can you find more?

Pomegranate Fact Check

Daily News and Analysis recently ran a story entitled, Pomegranate extract hailed ‘best thing since aspirin’ (article).

I've been watching medical breakthroughs for search challenges, since breakthroughs beg to be fact checked.

This article is no exception.  Here's the line that first attracted my attention:

For the first time they have been able to unlock the precious new extract from the seeds, skin and pith of the fruit.

The article goes on to credit  a company named ProbelteBio with the breakthrough and quotes a  Dr Sergio Streitenberger: "(until now) we haven’t had the science to enable us to release the benefits."

Is that right? It could be, but it doesn't take long to uncover potential Red Flags as you search.

What Red Flags do you find?

Learning the Hard Way

The email sounded promising:

Save & Record Calls

screen shot from the scam

Record all of your text messages, audio, video and conference conversations, quickly and easily. Cherish all of your important moments, and relive them over and over again.

I'd been thinking about a way to record my Skype audio, video and chat, so when this ad came along, I opened it. It turned out to be spam AND a scam, but I learned that--and I'm embarrassed to admit it--after I paid for the 'product.'

The 'product' was not what was promised. Instead of a way to record Skype audio, video and more, what I got was a collection of freeware. About the only advantage to my purchase is that I got the freeware links in one place without having to collect them myself.

I was going to write about this sooner, while the scam was live, but I waited too long and now it's been taken down after just a couple weeks. The web site is now nothing but a parking lot.

I initially acted too quickly--I should have investigated the offer and the owners more carefully before charging $50 for a three-year license to my credit card.

Ouch. Another lesson learned the hard way.

First potential Red Flag: they found me--I wasn't looking for them.

When it started to dawn on me that there was a problem with the offer (I couldn't seem to locate the download for the audio/video recording software--Red Flag only after I had already paid), I became aware of clues I had overlooked. The small print at the bottom of the page stated pretty clearly all the software was freeware. Why would anyone pay for freeware? Red Flag

There were links to more information but nothing got me closer to the tools I wanted. There were plenty of other things to distract me: software I could download that works as a Skype answering machine (but again, that's free).

I decided to see who the site owner is. That information was blocked in a whois search. (Another Red Flag).

At this point I was pretty confident that someone had built a nice looking site that promised way more than it delivered and they were not taking calls. An online help line was provided, but there were so many information fields to fill (and a warning to fill them in exactly) in that I was pretty certain this was going to be a dead end. (Red Flag).

There were more than a few Red Flags but my guard was down.  At the time I couldn't find any warnings about this site. There could be some now. For the record, here are the names from the bottom of the spam:


Media Internet Consultants - Edif. Neptuno, Planta Baja, Ave. Ricardo J. Alfaro, Tumba Muerto, n/a, Panama  

(try that in a Google search!)

And while I'm at it, here's the description of the 'merchant': MB-SALE.COM (a processing house for Internet vendors).

The Lesson: Does it matter if you don't investigate before you buy? You can bet you'll lose money if you don't.