Todd Bowman claims to be the interim General manager at Harrisburg airport in Pennsylvania. He has an abandoned package weighing 110Kg stuffed with money and wants to share it with me. He will pay the United States Non Inspection Charges of $3,700 so I can claim the money and I get to keep 70%. Of course he doesn’t know my name and doesn’t really exist – just a scammer with little imagination trying to catch gullible people.

The lazy scammer’s message just says ‘Earn $10K in as little as 5 days”. There are ways to earn money quickly but they usually need either a lot of capital to invest or are criminal. No thanks.

Half a dozen emails arrived at the radio station with exactly the same contents – just sent to a different made-up email address. “RE: Dispatched PO Material on 06042022. Please note that we dispatched your order from our factory. Herewith is the final invoice packing list”. This scammer doesn’t seem to know the difference between a packing list and an invoice and of course doesn’t know the name of anyone at the radio station as no-one placed an order. The attached file tries to look like a PDF file but is in fact a BZ2 compressed file. Scammers do this to try to get around malware scammers – hoping they cannot read the compressed file. They are wrong.

A message from J. Kirinec tells me that he was looking for an old friend who resides in my country – of course he doesn’t know my name or which country I live in. He says he in charge of ‘medic’ and wants to hear from me if “you are so pleased with you”. Like many scam message it makes no sense and is intended to get a reply from a confused person asking for more information. Just a way for scammers to find the sort of people they want to scam. 

Oh dear – an urgent message from the NatWest fraud team arrives – well actually a dozen of them, to different email addresses at the radio station. They all same the same thing – that an unknown computer has tried to access my account and I now must verify the account within 24 hours or it will be cancelled for security reasons. The Verify link actually goes to a website at broad-angry-single.glitch.me which is obviously not NatWest plus I don’t have a NatWest account.

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Some spammers target specific dates as they believe more people will open their messages e.g. Christmas, Thanksgiving,  Mother’s Day etc. Some choose April Fools day as a target and the numbers of such messages does go up noticeably on that day.

You might get messages with titles such as:

• April Fool
• I am a Fool for your Love
• Fooled you
• Have a laugh at this April Fool

The message may contain a link to click to see the joke or may have an attached file to download.

Either way, if you click to download or open this “joke,” it will attempt to install malware onto your computer – the most common form of this is the Trojan Horse which means malware that pretends to be harmless but gives the scammer access to your files and data.

Some genuine April fools jokes seem like scams and just waste people’s time without being funny.

Do be more suspicious than usual on April Fool’s day of all messages that arrive by email or text and be wary of clicking on anything supposedly leading to something funny – unless you are sure it is safe.

If you have any experiences with these scams do let me know, by email.

Peggy Chan’s email says she has a lucrative deal to share with me 50:50 but then I’ve never heard of Peggy Chan and her email address is actually wu872.kai@ so she doesn’t seem to know her own name. Just a pathetic scam looking for idiots to reply.

Yet another 419 scam email arrives. Claims to be from a Robert Justin (senior bank officer) but is from a personal Gmail address tuli.jake and he has $10,500,000 for me payable by the Republic of Uganda. I just need to send him (to a different personal email address) a lot of personal information – full name, contact details, birth date, occupation, address etc. and the money will be released.  Pathetic lies as usual.

Another health scam involves the scammer promising to tell you how to do a 5 second check that will identify if your thyroid gland is keeping you fat. Doctors do recommend a visual check on the thyroid gland which is in the neck but only a blood test checking hormone levels will tell you if your thyroid is working correctly. So, the supposed 5 second test is just fake.

The offer of a free Tesla series 3 car in a prize daw is back again this year. There is no such prize draw and the scammer still hasn’t learnt how to send out mail merges. The email says Hi {{firstname}} which is supposed to contain the recipients first name and it contains a list of supposed winners but that also contains entries such as {{FirstName}} {Surname}}. Scammers can get away with such dumb messages when they are looking for replies only from the dumbest people.

An email claiming to be from Nat West bank warns me there has been unusual activity on my account, so it has been temporarily suspended. I need to verify my account to remove the suspension and that must be done today or I forfeit the account. The email is from update5615222llpi0nmytza3421561 @notification.com so obviously from a scammer, plus he doesn’t know my name plus I don’t actually have any accounts at the Nat West.

Ronald Scott’s email is more professional than most from scammers. It’s actually from sales @o-sites.online (which is a fake website) but claims to be from an angel investor looking for projects and businesses to invest in. Real investors do not send out emails in bulk to people they have no idea about – only scammers and morons do that.

Most scam messages received at the radio station are in English or Russian. This latest one is in Spanish. Claiming to be from Anitha Selverage and tells a story of her being childless and having advanced cancer leading to why she has contacted me (doesn’t know my name of course) to entrust me with her legacy of $6.5 million for orphans, schools and churches and I get to keep a big cut for my effort. Just standard rubbish from a desperate scammer looking for idiots to reply.

Another email claiming to be from Amazon. This lazy spammer could only be bothered writing one line (“We lock your account and hold all your last orders”) and expects people to open the attached PDF file which is no doubt riddled with malware. No thanks.

DollyX says she still likes me and remembers me well and wants to meet up again. But her email address is actually Iziahswhitney at king-cobby2322.com and I have never met her so wont be offering to meeting up.

“Attention Dear,” as the start of an email,  pegs it as from a scammer as he doesn’t know my name. Turns out to be a typical 419 scam email. It continues with “I’m pleased to inform you that the asset valued at the sum of $75,000.000.00 was nabbed and recuperated by the FSSD-IMF surveillance unit.”  No explanation of why some fake government body wants to give me $75 million just that I need to send in a scan of my passport so they can release the non-existent money. No thanks – I’ll have better luck with the lottery.

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