MightyFunk

I sup­pose if you spend as much time as I do behind a com­puter, it’s only a mat­ter of time before some­one does a ‘bet­ter’ job of try­ing to take your cash. You all might be famil­iar of receiv­ing emails from Nige­ria — the famous 419 scam. You know, the ones with the sick or dying uncle or par­ent and they need to trans­fer money to your account?

The Niger­ian Con-Artists and my Cadillac:

Well, in my old blog, I had a story about that where I actu­ally got into an email shout­ing match with one of those Niger­ian scam­mers who was try­ing to buy my old car, and he ended the con­ver­sa­tion by saying:

—– Orig­i­nal Mes­sage —– From: “steven cool” To: “Charles Leo” Sent: Thurs­day, Novem­ber 18, 2004 8:23 PM Sub­ject: Re: Clas­sic 1985 Cadil­lac Fleet­wood Brougham Seville $975
SUCK YOUR MOTHER SWEAT PANT GO TO HELL
FU** YOU

–
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This makes me laugh. I reply again:

LOL. This gets reported to the FBI too. Hope you stick around so when they come to the door you’ll look ready to go to jail. Learn to speak eng­lish you stu­pid f**ker…

“Steven” replies:

DONT MAIL ME AGAIN OR IWILL SENT TO HELL MOTHERF**KER –

Well, at least that was a good time. I’m sure we both shared a few laughs — him call­ing me a ‘sweat pant wear­ing mofo’ and me telling him ‘the FBI is com­ing to lock your a** up.’ How he ever knew I wore sweat pants and worked from home is still the luck­i­est guesses I’ve ever encountered.

The Con-Artist Cam­era Store Outfit:

Flash for­ward to May 2008. My sleep sched­ule is all out of whack again and I’m lay­ing down on the couch about to pass out. My girl­friend was going to take pho­tos this week­end for a com­mu­nion — iron­i­cally for a bunch of Nige­ri­ans (and no I’m not racist, but I do think it is funny.) How­ever, as great of a cam­era as a Canon Rebel XTi is, it doesn’t have an exter­nal flash gun. The rea­son why most peo­ple use flash guns is that they have bet­ter con­trol over light­ing — often being able to avoid the harsh shad­ows and bright spots that most ‘point and shoot’ cam­eras tend to produce.

So I’ve been bid­ing my time, plan­ning to get a decent cam­era of my own for work. I fig­ure, hey it’s a write-off and I really do need a decent one for shoot­ing archi­tec­tural spaces. Lay­ing on the couch, I told her — ‘go order the Canon Speedlite (flash gun) from Son­ic­cam­eras with my card — I was plan­ning on get­ting one anyways.’

Now, Son­ic­cam­eras is this Inter­net cam­era out­fit I found through Google Shop­ping. (Note: I will not do them a plea­sure of link­ing to their web­site here as that only serves to boost their search rank­ings.) The prices were dirt cheap com­pared to every other out­fit out on the Inter­net. From the out­side, it also looks like a very gen­uine store. Plus, they were listed on Google Shop­ping so I guess I assumed it would have been safe.

So she reg­is­ters my email address, pass­word, user­name, and credit card num­ber as I pro­ceed to pass out. A few hours later I wake up and go to check my email — look­ing for the receipt so that I can add it to my busi­ness deduc­tions. The prob­lem is — there’s no receipt — just a con­fir­ma­tion email num­ber with no price listed. It also looks like there’s a dupli­cate email and Out­look flagged it as a poten­tially phish­ing email.

So, the red flag starts to raise a lit­tle. I fig­ure, well I’ll go to their web­site, login there, and print­out my receipt. The prob­lem is, I spend about 15 min­utes dig­ging through their site look­ing for a place I can check my order — just a sim­ple login page and there’s none to be found. The flag starts to get raised higher now. I start to think, ‘well it could just be a shitty web­site’ and I give their toll-free num­ber a call. I get to a direc­tory menu, and get put on hold indef­i­nitely with their ele­va­tor music.

At this point, the red flag is about to fly off the pole. I type ‘son­ic­cam­eras’ into Google and come across pages of peo­ple com­plain­ing that this store is a com­plete scam. I just about lost my soup. They’ve got my email, user­name, pass­word, and busi­ness bank card num­ber. I haven’t felt this humil­i­ated in such a long ‚long time. I had always prided myself in being able to detect when a site or an email was a scam and here I was falling prey to fraud.

Cor­rec­tive Measures:

First thing I did was to check my busi­ness account online. I saw no deduc­tions from my account — but it’s not always updated imme­di­ately. So I had to call them up and con­firm that there wasn’t any activ­ity. They told me that there wasn’t so I went ahead, can­celed my card and had them send me a new one.

Sec­ond mea­sure I took was to change all my pass­words and remove the card num­ber. I gen­er­ally use dif­fer­ent pass­words for dif­fer­ent web­sites, but occa­sion­ally they do over­lap. I wasn’t about to take any chances. The main prob­lem was that I’m reg­is­tered online with about 100+ web­sites — and had to start at the begin­ning one by one. So I just tack­led the most impor­tant ones first and would come back to the list later on.

Third thing I did was to run a ‘WhoIs’ on their domain name. I want to track this mofo down and deliver some pun­ish­ment. The prob­lem I ran into there is that they’re not listed. A few years back, domain name ser­vices started offer­ing ‘pri­vate’ reg­is­tra­tion so that you couldn’t track down infor­ma­tion on the peo­ple that reg­is­tered a web­site. They just hap­pened to have done that.

Fourth was to call up their domain name company/registrar — Godaddy.com. The per­son I get on the phone there has no clue what to do — and he can’t even begin to steer me in the right direc­tion. They have no inter­est what­so­ever about tak­ing cor­rec­tive mea­sures. In his own words, “we’re only respon­si­ble for the domain name. Sorry sir.”

Fifth mea­sure was to con­tact the local FBI office via phone and find out what I could turn up there. I get an agent on the phone and he lis­tens to my story. What he tells me is that I need to go to their Inter­net crimes divi­sion web­site at the Inter­net Crime Com­plaint Cen­ter. He also goes on to say that “unfor­tu­nately, they get so many claims on a daily basis that they can’t keep up. What ends up hap­pen­ing is that they look for a high num­ber of com­plaints regard­ing a spe­cific per­son or out­fit, or they look for a high dol­lar value trans­ac­tion to have occurred in order for them to take notice.”

So that’s just great. I’m already feel­ing like I’ve hit red tape. The bank is not will­ing to do any­thing. The domain name com­pany wants no part of this. The local FBI basi­cally says ‘write this other office and best of luck to you.’

So I start hit­ting the blog­ging com­mu­nity — writ­ing and telling peo­ple that the appro­pri­ate place to file a com­plaint is the FBI’s Inter­net Crime Com­plain Cen­ter and that we need to do this in mass together in order for them to take notice. Let­ters and emails start to come back to me — in par­tic­u­lar this one pretty nice guy named Ger­ald and his web­site www.desertexplorer.us. He goes on to send me a few links (some of which may or not be confirmed):

1) Bet­ter Busi­ness Bureau Link on them

2) Thoughts-of-Dave on Blog­ger (prob­a­bly the most com­pre­hen­sive blog about the topic so far)

3) NY Times arti­cle on their busi­ness practices

4) Infor­ma­tion about the peo­ple (pos­si­bly fam­ily or orga­ni­za­tion behind this)

5) A short post on Cnet

Con­clu­sions:

Is there a con­clu­sion? No. There wont be until they get put out of ‘busi­ness’ or end up in jail.

Sup­pos­edly from what I’ve read, these peo­ple have been doing this under mul­ti­ple names for over 7 years. Some­how, they evade the law and do a good enough job to make it worth their while.

I’m not so much upset about my sit­u­a­tion as I’ve caught it in time. What I am upset about is that oth­ers have been repeat­edly taken by this out­fit and I can’t just sit back idly and let it hap­pen to others.

Is it orga­nized? I would say yes. The indi­vid­u­als oper­at­ing these web­sites have some sort of orga­ni­za­tion. Their web­sites are fairly well laid out on their front-end. The indi­vid­u­als have enough brains to mar­ket their web­sites effec­tively and are will­ing to pay adver­tis­ing in order to have their search engine results ‘opti­mized.’ The reg­is­trant was smart enough to hide his reg­is­tra­tion details. The code behind their site (while gleaned from other cam­era web­sites) is ‘hacked’ fairly well together — it looks bet­ter than 95% of all other mer­chant sites in my opin­ion. Prod­ucts are con­stantly updated (as they have some of the lat­est cam­era equip­ment on there) so there is a def­i­nite inter­est in keep­ing their ‘ball’ rolling.

In a nut­shell, who­ever is run­ning this oper­a­tion is fairly bright with very low moral stan­dards and respect for oth­ers. I’m not a FBI pro­filer, but from what I’ve read about the few times peo­ple actu­ally got into con­tact with them, their ‘employ­ees’ scoff and laugh at the peo­ple they’ve taken. I think that in keep­ing their oper­a­tions up, they’re laugh­ing all the way to the bank with lit­tle repercussions.

They are scum.

I rec­om­mend that any­one that has sub­mit­ted their infor­ma­tion or has been defrauded by them write to the FBI Inter­net Crimes divi­sion imme­di­ately. They need to be taken out.

Update:

It’s been bug­ging me. I don’t like to be taken and when some­one tries to do that, I’m all about revenge (in a peace­ful man­ner of course.) Ear­lier today, I called up the local FBI office again. The agent I got on the phone today was a bit less polite, but did give me an actual phone num­ber to the FBI’s IC3. After a few more phone calls, I man­aged to finally get some­one on the phone who lis­tened to my story for about a 1/2 hour.

She elab­o­rated upon what one of the agents had told me ear­lier — that they receive about 8,000 com­plaints of fraud a month, and that they only have 11 peo­ple on staff to look into all these cases. That’s a really fright­en­ing sta­tis­tic. I mean — we ARE talk­ing about the FBI here… But I insisted that I’m always online, and I haven’t seen a scam like this in a very long time and that it’s really worth pay­ing atten­tion to. She replied that she would make spe­cial note of this par­tic­u­lar situation.

At this point, it is out of my hands and in the rest of the com­mu­nity to take a step for­ward. All I can do is hope for the best.