I got this same e-mail this morning. Most of the time I can distinguish between scams, but this one was a little better than the others. I usually reply something really foul back to them and they leave me alone. They should be ashamed of themselves.

I got a similar email with identical reference numbers! The thing is that I have a yahoo.co.uk address though I actually live in India. I guess the folks behind this scam thought I live in the UK and that I’d rush to my bank to send them the money!

I found that some of these scamsters are FORGING sender email addresses ( I received an email where the sender had used my own yahoo email id as the sender!) and then they try to sucker someone.

Yes, most of these Internet scams originate from Nigeria. Enterprising folks, aren’t they? If only they’d put this brainpower to honest use…..!

The situation with e-mail headers isn’t always that simple. In your case, “hebergement.com” is an innocent victim of this scam — the sender of the email is either forging e-mail headers to make it appear that the message originated from that domain, or exploiting a vulnerability in a mail server. It’s can be trivial to do either one.

The only thing you can put any amount of trust in is the originating IP address, which in my example I traced to a small operation (could very well be nothing more than a small internet cafe) in Nigeria. There’s no way the person associated with that IP address is going to care about the scam — they could even be complicit in it.

The best you can hope for by reporting these messages is that Yahoo improves their bulk mail filters as a result of your report, but that won’t help anybody that isn’t using Yahoo mail. Sure, you may get the scammer’s Yahoo mail account revoked as well, but he can always open another one.

If you want to take the time to report these messages, you can, but I personally think that time would be better spent educating others about this type of scam.

Mailwasher will do this all for me so I won’t have to do it manually myself, but if you need to do this manually, go to yahoo and find the report abuse setup there, if there isn’t one directly find the help section and scan it till you find where to report it, it’s there. Same for the internet company this email listed “hebergement.com” I just typed that into my browser and it took me to an internet provider page. It needs translation so you’ll need to use an internet translator site if you don’t speak the language hehe.

Anyways, there may not be much we can do, but at least there are a couple things, and the more people that report this to yahoo, the more people will be blocked from using that service for this type of garbage. Just my opinion, hope it gets a few people to at least try

Jo Ann

It’s certainly fraud, but the people perpetrating it are most likely somewhere in Nigeria, well out of the reach of decent law enforcement. In the U.S., you can report things like this to the FTC but it seldom, if ever, does any good — why would it?

Stuff like this happens all the time, and only very rarely is anyone punished. People just have to realize that by connecting themselves to the Internet, they’re participating in a grand experiment in anarchy, and it’s their own responsibility to keep themselves safe.