Fightback Ninja received a standard 419 scam email – a woman claiming to by dying of cancer and her husband left her millions of dollars and she wants me to distribute half of the money to charities and keep the rest.

All lies of course, but the interesting difference from most of these scam emails is at the bottom was a link to a donations web site.

The site is firstgiving.com and the scammer looks to have a donations page setup.

This is strange, but it’s not that simple and she is a scammer.

The link is to firstgiving.com but is invalid and checking firstgiving.com shows a very odd situation.

The scammer claims to have a fundraising page on firstgiving.com but the only fundraiser page appears to be for a centre for human rights in California and the page was created in 2011 but has raised $0.

Not so good. Checking for reviews of firstgiving.com shows real problems.  More than 7.5% fee for donations and a $20 fee per cheque sounds excessive.

Firstgiving seems to be a name used by Panorama fundraising and is a software service to enable people to fundraise.

Do they know scammers use their name?

Who knows, but better to avoid these strange people.

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