They got him! They finally got him!!!!
You guys. They got him. THE FEDS GOT HIM. pic.twitter.com/eOTjnpfhtw
— Phil Ewing (@philewing) September 11, 2018
I guess I’m not getting that $25 dollar electronic funds transfer though…
Open thread.
by Adam L Silverman| 44 Comments
This post is in: America, Criminal Justice, Open Threads, Cybersecurity
They got him! They finally got him!!!!
You guys. They got him. THE FEDS GOT HIM. pic.twitter.com/eOTjnpfhtw
— Phil Ewing (@philewing) September 11, 2018
I guess I’m not getting that $25 dollar electronic funds transfer though…
Open thread.
Comments are closed.
trollhattan
But, but…HE’S MY BARRISTER!
Now where will I turn for my legal and financial advises?
Karen A Weisz
Only 5 years?
Omnes Omnibus
@trollhattan: Cooiee!
Adam L Silverman
@trollhattan: Michael Cohen hasn’t been sentenced yet. He may be looking for clients.
Adam L Silverman
@Omnes Omnibus: You see this?
Ohio Mom
Wow. I didn’t ever imagine that there was one specific Nigerian. I thought it was some sort of cabal. That one guy did that all by himself, that’s impressive.
Chyron HR
“I barely knew Ummagumma! His trial had nothing to do with FAKE COLLUSION which is the WORST HOAX EVER! End the RIGGED WITCH HUNT now!”
Adam L Silverman
@Chyron HR: Crooked Hillary paid for the entire thing through her campaign lawyer to set up TRUMP! Fake NEWS! WITCH HUNT! #MAGA!!!!
Omnes Omnibus
@Adam L Silverman: I hadn’t. I have been basking in the afterglow of the Sunday night Packer game. But wow.
Adam L Silverman
@Omnes Omnibus: They lit Lambeau on fire again?//
Omnes Omnibus
@Adam L Silverman: Well, they lit Lambeau.
Adam L Silverman
@Omnes Omnibus: Close enough for government work.
Just Chuck
BEC is a lot more than the run of the mill Nigerian scams. It’s typically a targeted scheme involving getting a business that does a lot of spot cash transactions to sign off on a bogus transfer under time pressure. It usually involves some prior compromise beforehand to find identities to steal. Not that taking down a single BEC scammer makes an iota of difference, but it is a step up from the usual Nigerian scheme.
Omnes Omnibus
@Adam L Silverman: When I worked for WI’s election agency, my boss, a Marine, would lose his shit at that phrase.
Adam L Silverman
@Omnes Omnibus: I only try to use it ironically.
NotMax
Ah, scams.
An somewhat oldie but nonetheless a goodie is the Yemenis who own Mars.
Chip Daniels
Dear Mr. Trump
I am Nigerian businessman, incarcerated in New York, looking to launder billions of dollars out of country…
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Ohio Mom: I’ve read descriptions of Nigerian internet cafes (back in the day; I don’t know if internet cafes are still a thing anywhere) where every single person there was busily engaged in Nigerian-scamming.
It’s not just one person, it’s an industry. One that is always evolving. In fact my first encounter with it was a snail-mail letter received in a business PO Box. I’m sure our inboxes will continue to be flooded.
Sounds like this was a more specific, more targeted scam. See Just Chuck’s comment at #13.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
I no longer have the bookmarks or remember their locations, but there used to be a couple of really good scam-the-scammer websites that suckered these guys into extended correspondences, offers of marriage, etc. Even occasionally getting money out of them.
Ohio Mom
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: Thanks, that explanation makes more sense — and confirms my original understanding, that there was a good-sized group behind the emails.
I actually got one of those emails, years ago. Looking back, I should have printed it out for a souvenir.
Ruckus
@Ohio Mom:
I’ve gotten both emails and a letter.
The emails were better written. Not by much mind you, but better.
satby
@Adam L Silverman: I see our own BellaQ weighed in on that Twitter thread too.
I just want all of them in jail. Soon. Pence too.
Schlemazel
HELLO GOOD FRIEND!
My name is Onyekacki Opara and I find myself in a situation that will be of good benefits to you.
I have in an account in the Bank of Great England of the amount of $21,000,000 . Unfortunately I am unavailable to access these fund owning to my current situation in a foreign country.
Meh, you get the idea
Chip Daniels
@Schlemazel: And my beautiful assistant, a Russian national who loves guns, is looking for middle aged lonely man to have sexy sexytime with, if only she could get bail….
Schlemazel
@Chip Daniels:
Maybe we could introduce these two to each other
Adam L Silverman
@satby: Who do you think emailed her the tweet?
randy khan
@Ruckus:
I’ve read that one of the tricks is to make the writing imperfect because it makes the marks believe they’re smarter than the cons.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Adam L Silverman: there was a post at slate laying out all the state charges Manafort could face if he doesn’t cut a deal. IANAL, but I hope that L was right, and I really hope Barbara Underwood hates trump as much as most people
Luthe
My favorite Nigerian scam email is the one I got from “Mr. Warren Edward Buffett Billionaire investor.”
Adam L Silverman
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: He’s facing a lot of jeopardy at the state level in multiple states. And Underwood does not seem to be a fan.
Bill Arnold
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
Probably you’re thinking of https://www.419eater.com/
( https://www.419eater.com/html/ethics.htm )
I never had the nerve or (mainly) vindictiveness. (A friend did an early 2000s 419 spoof involving Princess Leia (the person at the linked site did not write it) )
randy khan
@Adam L Silverman:
There was a similar report last week, FWIW.
jonas
Wait, so what happened to the widow of the Nigerian general who has my money order for the fee to transfer the $250 million into a Swiss bank account for me?
jonas
@Luthe: If it doesn’t address you as “Dearest Beloved Friend in the Lord,” it isn’t a real Nigerian scam email.
Roger Moore
@Chyron HR:
Well, Floyd didn’t really hit their stride until Meddle.
NotMax
@Roger Moore
Vigorous golf clap.
Always had a soft spot for Atom Heart Mother.
Ruckus
@randy khan:
First, it didn’t work.
Second, I find it difficult to think that an educated person, could even think badly enough to write that bad. Then it hits me that our current asshole in charge had a prep school/reasonable college education. Which of course he got absolutely nothing out of. Fred must have been pissed that he paid that much and got nothing for it.
NotMax
@Ruckus
Well, on the plus side he got Donald to be elsewhere.
John Revolta
Mmmph. That’s not MY Nigerian businessman. MY Nigerian businessman is a Goddamn PRINCE!!
Felanius Kootea
Oh wow, an actual Nigerian name this time and not a Louisianan “Nigerian scammer” by the name of Michael Neu. Impressive.
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: Internet cafes are still a thing in many developing countries. The scammers who lurk in the Nigerian ones are called “yahoo boys” but not everyone using the Internet cafe is a scammer.
My first academic job in the US, one of my colleagues (originally from Norway) received a Nigerian scam email from someone pretending to be Umaru Dikko, a former Nigerian Minister accused of embezzling billions of dollars from Nigeria and fleeing to the UK, where he lived out his days in style. There’s a fascinating story about how a subsequent Nigerian government, with help from the Israelis tried to kidnap him from the UK in a diplomatic bag, but that’s one for another day.
Since I was the only Nigerian my colleagues knew (and the only black person in my research lab), I was asked to explain the scam email (because of course, every Nigerian knows every scammer). I asked the colleague who’d received the email to forward it to me and I send a metric ton of curses to the scammer. He replied and said something along the lines of “Wait, you made it out to the US and live well and now you’re trying to prevent me from earning a living? How mean of you. By the way, if you send me some dollars I might stop targeting your colleagues.” I gave up at that point.
oldgold
From WaPo:
Interesting.
divF
@NotMax: I used to open my Sunday morning radio show with Careful with that Axe, Eugene. I thought it was a great segue from the religious programming that preceeded me.
Keith P
Obama gets Bin Laden, Trump gets the Nigerian email scammer. So much winning.
HeartlandLiberal
The scams are relentless. Couple days ago an email slipped through the spam filters of my university account, which I got to keep in retirement, and has excellent spam filtering, offering me a job doing home work for Walmart. Yeah, right. I pulled up the received headers, and figured out the email originated from from some IP in Nigeria. It was faking an from: address at some university here in the U.S.A., totally false and easily forged, of course.
As for the phone scams, they continue. Right not we get a couple of area code 202 calls every day, usually a 202-860-nnnn number. Never answer these. They are usually IRS scams, spoofing DC area code to try and make you think the call is legit.
Also, we are still getting daily calls from long phone numbers starting with letter “V”, which appears from what I researched on Google to be new generation autodialers used by businesses and cons artists.
It has gotten so bad the last few months we simply don’t answer the phone unless the caller ID shows who is calling and we know them, or the number without caller ID is one we recognize. They can leave a message if they are legit.