Eclectical Engineering

E-mail scamming (for 419 frauds, job scams, lottery scams, and the like) is the bush league of internet crime. These folks are audacious, but generally not very smart. Here’s a case in point, received just today:

Hi,
I am a Sponsor of an Internet University. She motivates and train for sucess. She also pays $20 for each student you enrol as a “BASIC MEMBER”;while as a “PREMIUM MEMBER” you recieve double ($40 ) per each student you enrol. All you have to do is to ADD our Link to your website.

We’ve seen your website at
http://www.rickconner.net/
spamweb/spam_nigerian_cc.html
and we love it!

We see that your traffic rank is 689476
and your link popularity is 76.
Also, you have been online since 9/20/2002.

Please contact me at:
afaniran$comui.edu.ng (address munged)

Thank you.

(name removed)

+234(Nigerian phone number removed)

I have a few questions for afaniran, but as a rule I don’t respond directly to e-mail from criminals. So, perhaps he (or she) will discover this posting and leave a comment for us.

1. Why is your university female? Most universities I know are gender-neutral.
2. What is the link I’m supposed to add? You forgot to provide it. Oh, I guess I’m supposed to respond via the e-mail address you provided — but this address was issued by another university that appears to be in competition with yours (and may not be either female or internet-based). Just so that there’s no confusion on the point, I’ve notified the postmaster that you are using this address, and sent along a copy of your message for appropriate handling.
3. I’m glad you all loved my website. How closely did you actually read it? Closely enough, it seems, to decide that someone who publishes warnings about stupid Nigerian con-artists would be a willing participant in your own scheme.
4. Thank you for providing my page rank info. I guess this is supposed to convey to me that you are smart enough to look such things up. I also guess I’m somehow supposed to care about this information. I don’t.
5. Thank you also for scraping my contact address from domain-WHOIS to use for commercial offers (which is in violation of ICANN policy, as well as the policies of my own registrar). You could have used the actual address I provided on the site to contact me, but I suppose that this did not occur to you.