Email

Fraudulent emails is an increasing problem in today's Internet oriented day. The fraudsters can have several methods but in the end they want one thing, your money.

As late as today (2005-12-22) my grandmother told me that she received a phonecall yesterday. This call was in English, something that is odd as both herself and me is from Norway and the primary language is Norwegian. The gentlemen, sounding sincere told her that she had won a cruise. In order for her to get the money he would need her bank account number to wire the money. Thankfully my grandmother had the insight to stop the phonecall right there and then.

In the form of emails this might look something like:

Dear.
My name is Dr Mr Lisin Sufo.I want to ask quietly for your assistance or
help in looking for a reliable and honest person who will be capable to
receive some amount of money in a foreign account. I am in the Audit
Department of a local bank here in South Africa. I discovered a floating
fund in an account opened in the Bank in 1999 and till now nobody has
operated on this account. And the owner of the account died without a (heir)
hence the money is floating and if nothing is done to remit this money out
urgently it will be forfeited according to the laws of South Africa since it
isn't close to Five years of its dormancy. The owner of this account was a
foreigner and owned a Mining Engineering Firm in CapeTown .He died since
2000 and no other person knows about this account or anything concerning it
except my bank.

Am only contacting you as a foreigner. The management of my bank is ready
to approve this payment to any foreigner who has the correct information of
this account. .
I will use my position and influence to obtain all legal approvals for
onward transfer of this money and appropriate clearance from foreign
exchange department. You will have some part of the funds after the transfer
as a gratification. We can negotiate that but then we must sign a binding
agreement stating that on receipt of the funds you will not try to cheat me
.Reply to my private Email... xxx@yyy.com, With your full Name and
Telephone Number.
YOU are the first and the only one that I have contacted for this
transaction, so reply urgently that I will know what next to do. if you and
I agree, I will disclose the account information to you for application and
will make the transfer urgent. I need your full co-operation to make this
work fine.

Best Regards,
Lisin Sufo Dr (Mr)

This type of email is commonly referred to as a 419 scam email. The number is the section of the Nigerian penal code that deal with fraud, and this country is where this kind of emails has its offspring.

Now, an important question has been asked me several times, what to do when receiving such an email. My view is that the issue at hand can only be solved through educating the users, and not by trying to pursue everyone sending such messages. If the success-rate decrease it will get less attractive to be involved in such activities as well. There are, however a couple things you can do, both technically and non-technically.

If the email contain a link they want you to click on, you can contact the owner of the network the server is hosted on. You can find this out by doing a DNS (Domain Name Server, the system that convert a human-readable name into a numeric Internet Protocol (IP) address) lookup and then a whois on the IP-address in order to get the netblock owner. You can do this, amongst other places from the website http://www.dnsstuff.com . However if you prefer not to deal with the technical aspect of how the Internet operate you still have some things you can do.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C) cooperate to fight fraud and you can read about the project at http://www.ifccfbi.gov . IFCC's mission is to address fraud committed over the Internet. For victims of Internet fraud, IFCC provides a convenient and easy-to-use reporting mechanism that alerts authorities of a suspected criminal or civil violation. For law enforcement and regulatory agencies at all levels, IFCC offers a central repository for complaints related to Internet fraud, works to quantify fraud patterns, and provides timely statistical data of current fraud trends.

If you like you can read more about this subject at http://www.419fraud.com

If the fraudsters attempt on phishing you can contact the company in question. ( read more about phishing on http://www.secure-my-internet.com/browsing.php )

Secure communication

If you send internal information, or otherwise sensitive data, don't do so using non-secured communication, visit our partner-site secure-my-email.com to learn what to do in this case