Guy Davis - the Latest Target of Nigerian Scam

Philip Guy Davis alias 'Silver Phil', a music promoter, was hit with a complicated e-mail scam during the third week of February 2010. The 26 years old victim now wants to narrate how the scam, more precisely the 'Nigerian scam' tricked him.

To begin, his Yahoo e-mail address book was hacked so that approximately 800 of his acquaintances were sent a spam e-mail, which implored the recipient to send in money.

The message in the e-mail informed that Guy Davis was stuck in Dubai and urgently required assistance to pay hotel bill of £628 since he had lost his bag.

Said Guy Davis, many people were convinced with the e-mail. One friend from Austin, Texas, even withdrew $1,000 towards relieving him of the debt. Oxfordmail.co.uk reported this on February 20, 2010.

It was only when friends started calling Guy Davis that he became aware of the fraudulent electronic mail.

Subsequently, Yahoo too came out with its remarks on the scam, after which it appeared as if Guy Davis had fallen for a phishing scam, reported oxfordmail.co.uk on February 20, 2010. In such scams, fraudsters, pretending to be big companies, try to steal users' private information.

Meanwhile, as scam e-mails are regularly targeting innocent netizens, experts from Symantec noted in their "February 2010 Spam Report" that currently the traditionally fashioned social engineering deception had reached an unprecedented peak the company had ever gauged.

The criminals behind such scams work on behalf of organized cybercriminal gangs and establish offshore servers to facilitate thefts of e-mail addresses of legitimate people like Guy Davis in this case. The crooks then distributed fake 'Help' e-mail messages asking for financial assistance.

Symantec's specialists explained that these culprits are engaged in a game of numbers, i.e. they estimate that even a fraction of responses with either money transfers or credit card numbers from the recipients of the fraudulent phishing e-mails would be enough to serve their purpose of making money.

Hence, e-mail users are suggested to exercise extreme caution in handling incoming messages and if they notice any suspicious activity on personal accounts, they should report that to the appropriate authorities.

Related article: GIO’s Confidential Information Hacked and disclosed

» SPAMfighter News - 3/1/2010