From time to time, we see in our labs really funny emails pretending to be deadly serious.
This time, I received one such email on my personal email address, and I couldn’t stop laughing after reading it full. And this, believe me, it was a challenge.
Apparently, you see an empty email with only a plain text attachment and a subject written in capitals. But, the email pretends to come from FBI (the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigations).
The subject is very interesting: WE THE FBI HAVE WARRANT TO ARREST YOU GET BACK TO US FOR YOUR OWN GOOD
This sounds interesting enough to open the attached TXT document. The document is not easy to read, as it is 114 lines long and written in a terrible English language.
The document has 5400 words in 114 lines, but maybe the half is text, the rest is white spaces.
Here is the idea of the email:
You are a wanted criminal – FBI tried to reach you, they couldn’t, so your picture is on the main FBI website as a wanted person.
A “good guy” is trying to help you and avoid “this shame on you and your family“, but you need to pay 98$ him for his help – which actually he is going to pay to an attorney who actually will help you solve “the problem”.
Somewhere toward the end of the document is mentioned the reason why you are wanted: you acted in a Nigerian scam to transfer funds in value of 10.5 million $. That’s a lot of money… and there is no fun to deal with Nigerian scammers.
And now comes to really good part: you need to pay the 98$ to :
NAME: OBI JACOB
ADDRESS: LAGOS NIGERIA
TEXT QUESTION:FOR
ANSWER: YOU
Yes, to a person in Nigeria.
After this, comes the confusing part… it is not clear to me if the scammers have mistakenly mixed the text of a Nigerian scam with this email. They say that you will get a “certificate” which will allow you to get the 10.5 million dollars. I don’t really understand what the idea is, I guess they also don’t understand what they are writing there since the entire text is half meaningful.
And at the end, to give to the message even a more credible look, it is signed:
ROBERT MUELLER
WASHINGTON DC
Anti-Terrorist and Monetary Crimes Division
Fbi Headquarters In Washington, D.C.
Federal Bureau Of Investigation
J. Edgar Hoover Building
935 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, D.C. 20535-0001 Website: www.fbi.gov
Looking at the headers of the email, I can only say that it is sent from a real AOL account, probably obtained though hacking AOL’s servers or from some phishing websites.
At the end, there is only one question left: is this a new type of Nigerian Scam?
Leave your comments on our Facebook and Twitter pages.
Fortunately, our Antispam module detects the email as high level spam.
I advise all our readers to simply erase these emails and never pay any requests like this.
Sorin Mustaca
Leave a reply
