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The Cyber Investigation Part 1

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Author: Aririesike Jude
Posted to the web: 6/3/2006 1:40:43 PM

The Cyber Investigator take a clinical and psychological peep into the cyber crime network of African young people who spend 60% of their day and 99% of their night in the cyber café sending hundreds of mails to hundreds of email addresses illegally extracted from different search engines. Their target: the uninformed, innocent, gullible and most especially greedy people.
 

A typical successful cyber fraudster is often times a graduate in specialized courses such Psychology, Sociology, Communication Studies etc. He employs meticulous efforts in composing scam mails. When he finishes writing the bogus funds transfer story he wishes to “sell” to a would-be victim, there are few things he must do:
 

(a) Using email extractor, he goes to the various search engines and extracts thousands of emails both active and inactive ones from different sites.
 

(b) Since the story in itself is all lies and that there are no monies trapped anywhere in the first place, the scammer tries once more to make the story as credible as possible. Often times, he makes the tone of such mails very pathetic. This is, of course, used to prick the conscious of the rich but gullible people into accepting to help in this phoney funds transfer.
 

(c) Considering that the scammer knows neither the name nor the gender of the owners of such extracted emails, he makes the greeting section of the mail anonymous. This explains why in those kinds of fraudulent letters you rarely observe greetings like “Dear Sir”, “Dear Madame”, “Dear John”, “Dear Rose” etc. He will prefer words and phrases like “Dear Friend”, “Dear One”, “Greetings”, “Good Day to You” etc. In most cases the greeting section is completely ignored and excised. The main body of the letter continues right after the subject.
 

(d) He will strive to include in the letter fictitious physical address and a non-existent telephone line. Where the telephone line is in service it will be a cell phone. Cell phones can only be traceable to the scammer’s country and not his province or his exact location. This scammer is well aware of this snag. Naturally, the whole idea is to take advantage of the loopholes created by the system itself!
 

(e) He counterfeits a semblance of letterheads, signatures, stamps and official seal of an existent bank to be made available as supporting documents if the would-be victim demands for them.
 

(f)The Scammer makes contact with a supposed bank manager, accountant, bank auditor or bank representative who themselves are also part of the cyber fraud network. In some highly organized fraud cases, a genuine staff of a reputable and authentic bank is surreptitiously recruited as a part of the network at some agreed terms.
 

(g) Once all these ends have been tidied up, he now begins to send the mails.

 Hundred of emails are sent out per day.

When the would-be victim requests for more information, he/she will be advised to contact the Bank representative who will be continuously briefed on the “progress report” made with the would-be victim.
 

Any reply received after sending the mails suggests good tidings to a cyber fraudster. First he will thank the would-be victim for replying the mail and assures him of the authenticity of the transaction.

If he/she writes back and expresses some concerns, quite typical, the scammer will refer the would-be victim to the Bank representative for further details.

The would-be victim may likely contact the Bank representative who will, undoubtedly, collaborate the story of the scammer and will go a step further in clarifying more details to him/her.
 

At this point when the deal is beginning to get seemingly real to the would-be victim, the scammer will strike his first note! He will remind the would-be victim he is in a hotel and that he has not paid his bill for the past two weeks and the hotel manager is threatening to throw him out. The victim will be requested to send money through Western Union Money Transfer to offset the hotel bill if the deal must go on. In some other cases, if the victim requests for the supporting documents, he/she will be asked to pay some money for the documents to be secured. Their initial request ranges from USD800-USD1000.
 

“IF IT SOUNDS TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE, IT PROBABLY IS”


To Be Continued

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