Markus’ Blog

I got another interesting specimen of e-mail today. It’s along the lines of this masterpiece I wrote about last year.

Here it comes. The e-mail address they published in the original has been removed, because I am certainly not going to help them with their scam by publishing their e-mail even more.

Dear PayPal,

This is a message to inform you about the CASE PP245621185, concerning your paypal account and 1 other

Beginning on 2 July 2007, a new PayPal company, PayPal (Europe) S.a r.l. & Cie, S.C.A. (PayPal Luxembourg), have become the service provider for PayPal in the EU.

Due some technical errors we face we have delayed some payments. You are now having 1 payments to you from [hotmail -email address removed] of a total of 321.65$ to be added in your account.

Please proceed to the payment of the fee (0.35$for each payment+1%) which is 3.26$.

Once your payment been received you will get a receipt via mail and your payment amount of 321.65$ will be visible and added in your account. If there is no amount in your account or you are not able to proceed with the payment your account access will be limited. Login in the following link and proceed with the process.

Sincerely,

PayPal Account Review Department

The first thing to notice, of course, is the bad English the mail is written in. Although I have to say it’s not nearly as bad as the “German” in that other e-mail from last year. At least this e-mail is understandable and only slightly off. Still, not the kind of publication you’d receive from a reputed company.

The scariest thing, though, is that here will actually be people replying to this scam by sending money. And you don’t need many people replying. Say it cost $500 to send the spam to 2 million e-mail addresses. All you need is 0.1% of those 2 million recipients to reply to you and you are making $(3.26*2000)-500=6020. More than $6000 in profits.

Yes, 2000 people is lots, but 2000 people out of 2 million is not that many. Still, I don’t know if it is actually reasonable to expect 2000 people to fall for this scheme, but it is certainly a possibility.

The funniest detail I haven’t even mentioned yet. They didn’t even get their calculation right. It says “Please proceed to the payment of the fee (0.35$for each payment+1%) which is 3.26$.” If I understand correctly, that means 321.65*0.01+0.35, but the result of that calculation is 3.56, not 3.26 as they claim.

Obviously, they are not very thorough scammers.