Consumer Alert: Culling The Herd

Okay, WHAT??? How dumb - or "relationship-challenged" would you have to be to believe something like this?

The WaPoo is reporting that scammers are actually emailing people and purporting to be hired killers who will not kill them &mdash for a fee:

"The sender tells the receiver, 'I've been hired to kill you, it's one of your friends, I'm watching you. However . . . I don't believe you did what they said, and I'm going to give you a chance to pay me, and I won't kill you,' " Fairfax police spokeswoman Camille Neville said.

Yaknow, if someone tried that line on us, our first response would be to try and trace their IP address, ping them, find out what we could and take it to the local villaincatchers. And the FBI.

Plus, we'd want some proof. Okay, you're watching us? What's our address? How many people live in our house. Something like that.

Plus, if someone's trying to rip us off over the internet, aren't they opening themselves to charges of fraud, extortion, and deity only knows what else?

We grew up in the era of Godfather-style gangster movies. We expect to receive messages like the above attached to the dismembered horse's head in our bed. Not in our damn emailbox.

To our great amusement, one recipient had this response:

"You sit there and start racking your brain and thinking, 'Who would want to do it?' " Walker said. "Say that e-mail went to 10,000 people. Five percent of people probably responded to it, if for no other reason than to ask what was going on."

You're kidding us, right? There are people who wouldn't automatically hit delete? Or, better yet, set up spam filters? Hey, this is people's work eaddies we're talking about here! What's IT's policy on spam, anywho?

The article goes on to say:

The Internet Crime Complaint Center, which tracks e-mail scam trends, warned of an increase in such threats in December 2006.

[...]

Web crooks have impersonated FBI agents who have demanded bribes or made threats; claimed to be State Department officials who discovered recipients' inheritances abroad; and called themselves U.S. soldiers in need of help, usually involving banking information.

The State Department wants you to know that it is not about to contact your skeezy ass with information about money that it might have that might belong to you. Hahaha. As if we needed them to tell us that. You'd probably have to beat the entire department about the head and shoulders with various weapons to make them release a single red cent of your money.

So if you, or anyone you know, is a beneficiary of such scams, here's what to do:

[...Do] not reply but instead report them to the Internet Crime Complaint Center, a partnership of the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Center, at http://www.ic3.gov. Any e-mails that contain information such as the recipients' names or locations should be reported to police, authorities said.

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