Output Stream of Consciousness

I have seen a remarkable decline in the variant of the 419 scam with civil servant/general needing to get millions of dollars out of the country and having chosen you to help with this sub-legal endeavour.

The slightly newer take seems to be asking people to "be their company representative", and that it is "inconvenient" to do the cheque cashing or payment transfer themselves, and that you could do it for them for 10% of the take.

This type of scam has been floating around for a little bit (since late 2005 at latest) but things usually don't cross my e-mail pile until the technique starts to become more popular.

Why they would choose you, at random, instead of any number of myriad merchant services with a known track record is, of course, the important question, and the essence of the scam, I should surmise.

Here are the first two scam variations I received:

#1

Rose-Household Textile Limited England.
ADDRESS: JOHNS WOOD RD, LONDON, NW8QP
TELEPHONE:+447045704997
Fax:+447030402076

Dear Sir/Ma,

Would you like to work online from home and get paid weekly?

Rose-Household Textile Limited in England needs a bookkeeper in the
state, so I want to know if you will like to work online from home and
get paid weekly without leaving or affecting your present job? It's
just that I presently run a textile and fabrics firm I inherited from
my late Dad here in the London UK and we need someone to work for the
company as a representative/book keeper in the states.My company
produces various clothing materials, batiks, assorted fabrics and
traditional costume, which we have clients we supply weekly in the
states.My clients make payments for our supplies every week in in
cheques and via bank transfer, so we need someone in the States to
work as our representative and assist us in processing the payments
from our clients and I will pay him weekly salary.

ALL YOU NEED TO DO IS RECEIVE THIS PAYMENTS FROM OUR CLIENTS IN THE
STATES OR CANADA THROUGH WIRE TRANSFER OR CHEQUES THEN DEDUCT YOUR
WEEKLY PAY 10% AND FOWARD THE BALANCE TO ANY OF OUR COMPANY BRANCHES
AROUND THE WORLD.

Our payments will be issued out in your name and you get them cashed in
your bank deduct your weekly salary 10% and forward the balance to the
company.
If you are interested I would send you an employment letter which you
are to sign and send back to me as soon as possible and I would need you to give me your full name ,home address e-mail address and your phone number for me to get in contact with you.
I await your urgent response.
Warmest Regards,
Clement James
Rose-Household Textile Limited in England.
http://www.rose-household.co.uk/index1.htm

The second one is very similar in intent, contains the same 10%.

Dear Prospective Representative,

ACT AS OUR COMPANY PAYMENT REPRESENTATIVE

First and foremost, I will like to introduce to you ''Anhui Guofeng Plastic Industry ''. Anhui Guofeng Group Co.Ltd is the State Key High-tech Enterprise and one of 18 Anhui Provincial Enterprise Groups and based in China and this commenced operations in 1984. We are into Plastic profile, Plastic film, Plastic pipe, power wire and non-metallic material production which is majorly imported from Asia and sold to our numerous customers all over the World.

Presently, we are faced with some problems most especially with our Payment methods as most clients we have in the United States/Canada prefer to pay us with cheque rather than cash. We find it very cumbersome in accepting such payments due to the new monetary policy in our banking systems here in China and this is crippling our business. We have numerous customers in the United States/Canada and we cannot afford to loose them due to this problem.

We hereby request for your hand in partnership to act as our payment Representatives (Anhui Guofeng Plastic Industry), to act as our clients who shall receive payment on our behalf from our customers in the United States and Canada. You shall be entitled to 10% of each payment you receive on our behalf and this shall be a continuous process.

Upon receipt of this requested information, we shall provide you with the necessary details of how to become our representative. For official purpose, please send your response and acceptance via same email for futher proceedure.

Yours Sincerely,

Mr. Chang Quin
Administrative Manager
Anhui Guofeng Plastic Industry.

Just a note: "Quin" is not a legitimate spelling in pinyin. You can have Qun (which sounds like "chwin" already), Quan, Qin and Qian, but not Quin.

The only unusual thing about the last e-mail was that the source address was not spoofed (so it really was sent from a core.com address). That said, core.com is an internet provider that requires no credit cards. Well, at least the scammers had to spend $10 on throwaway internet access.

There is an Anhui Guofeng group, but they have an import/export group already, with a guofengexport.com domain for their e-mails, not Yahoo! China. The import/export side has been going since 1999, so I would really surmise that they truly have the payment thing down pat.

(I wonder if the good folks at Anhui Guofeng know that the guofengexport.com site exposes a lot of .eml files?)

Here are earlier discussions of the pretending-to-be-Anhui Guofeng scam.

The interesting thing on that discussion was that two scamheads popped up. One of the messages went like this:

I don't think it is a scam because i did business with them and it went on smoothly and i am still doing business today so i would advice that you don't distroy the name of the company because it is good and reliable company.

Best Regards,

William Smith

Well, actually, it wasn't two scamheads. It was one posting twice. I covered sock puppetry rather badly on my bilingual Esperanto Day posting, but this is another perfect case of sock puppetry indicating the failed ethics of the poster.

I wish there was a Law of sock puppetry I could handily quote. If none appears soon, we may have to invent one.

Anyhow, reading through the rest of the discussion, it sounds like money laundering/cheque forging is involved in this one, which is a change from the usual advance fee frauds, but disturbing nonetheless.

The Law of Too Good To Be True definitely applies :)