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Why don't we turn the table on them? Send back a reply that you live under a bridge and are responding with a stolen phone. You could sure use the money they promise you and would gladly help. Unfortunately you can't open a bank account without a minimum deposit of (pick a suitable amount).
Perhaps there are gullible scammers as well.
Edit: What kind of person could be upset enough to downvote this? Anyway, a nice 'good morning' goes to Nigeria today!
modified 1-Nov-12 4:04am.
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Thank you, Mr. Scammer, you are my last hope. The bridges here at the polar circle are very cold and drafty and I will probably not survive the coming winter. By your message I can see that you also have encountered hard times, so I'm more than willing to help. Unfortunately the banks here will not let homeless people open a bank account unless a minimum deposit of 500$ is made. If you can help me over this obstacle, we can then quickly see to bringing your money to safety.
(I hope the monitor survived the next shower)
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For some reason that still reminds me of the sketch whereby someone was rung at home by a telemarketer. He apologised and said that unfortunately he was very busy, thanked them for the call and asked for their home number so he could call back later to discuss it further at a time it was convenient. They resisted and resisted until finally he asked "Oh, I guess you don't like people calling you at home then?" - the answer was clearly affirmative, before he retorted "Yeah well, I'm at home right now!" (it was Seinfeld)
I did that to a company trying to sell water-coolers once. The sound of the girl's voice after I did the same thing was priceless. I still get a giggle from time-to-time about it now, some 15 years later.
I'll be sure to report back here with any ensuing hilarity. Thanks for the idea.
Edit: meant to say the monitor's fine, it's just the front of these shorts that suffered..
Make it work. Then do it better - Andrei Straut
modified 30-Oct-12 12:55pm.
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Makes no sense - you're not falling into their core demographics - extremely gullible people but which _do_ have some money.
OTOH, giving out a real account number cannot harm you - no bank will make payments from your account without some sort of proof that you authorized the payment - such as a signed payment order or an electronically authenticated transfer, so your account should be safe as long as you don't pass confidential info on to the scammer.
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The only problem with replying with anything is that you establish that your e-mail is valid and active. This will be distributed to other spammers that they've found an idiot and your spam mail will increase 10-fold
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It's worth a try. A friend of mine managed to talk a spammer into sending him a check years ago. It was a real Bank of Something or Other cashiers check.
(A check that was part of a stolen shipment of blanks and was filled out by the spammer not the bank; but nonetheless it was a real check.)
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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I think its a good idea. I will sometimes waste a little bit of time and ask them to forward the routing # and account # where I can pick up the money. I tell them that I don't disclose any information over email. I have yet to hear back, but I guess there is a certain amount of personal satisfaction anyway.
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CDP1802 wrote: Perhaps there are gullible scammers as well.
We just need a source of guaranteed-to-be-fake account and routing numbers we can use to reply with. Or.. [snicker] the account and routing numbers of other scammers (Ok, that last bit's a joke because it would be breaking the law, but it would be funny).
Heck, maybe interpol could hook the false account numbers up to a trap that automatically freezes the assets of the money's destination.
We can program with only 1's, but if all you've got are zeros, you've got nothing.
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Seems like some nigerian jerks are trying to downvote your post
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You give away most of that information every time you write a check.
If you're wearing your McDonald's outfit when you write the check, they've got all of it.
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Just a note...when you write a check the recipient has
all the bank account info including account name and
number etc.
73
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It's hard to believe anyone would write a check based on this mail, but apparently some are gullible enough.
Bastard Programmer from Hell
if you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
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if (_Uptime != null)
{
_Uptime.Remove(TraCommon.Tokens.TraService_Speed);
}
{
_Uptime = new Service.Message();
_Uptime.Code = SysCommon.CommandCode.SysUptimeEvt;
} I just found this in my code. It's been there for years.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Took me a minute to see that one.
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Software Zen: delete this;
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After that post in the Lounge earlier, there seems to be something of a trend of screwing up control structures today!
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This[^] one?
'Tis quite similar. Mine was a sin of omission, while his was a sin of emission.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Gary Wheeler wrote: Mine was a sin of omission, while his was a sin of emission.
Someone mentioned in the other link that an empty statement shouldn't be allowed after an if statement.
I think both should be allowed, but have warning messages. His would be "The conditional <if|else> statement won't execute anything", yours "Extra brackets added for no apparent reason". Both may be a stretch for the compiler to see. On the other hand, people who like padded coding might not like that.
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Thought I said "The conditional (if-else) statement won't execute anything" but I used the special characters (@lt; @or; >) that hid it and didn't look at my preview. Great, only gt works as substitution letters.
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Yeah... just last week it took me and another engineer brainstorming for an hour before we realized a bit was flipped the wrong way. Our world is fun, wild, and at times all too damned granular.
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that. - George Carlin
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Oops! That had to hurt.
I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.
Stephen Hawking
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