Email Account of John Perham Compromised by Cybercrooks

Recently, in the last week of November 2010, a malware writer attempted to swindle money from contacts of Crimestoppers Chairman John Perham, as reported by Yahoo.com on November 26, 2010.

The criminal had sent e-mails to all the contacts of John Perham informing them that John and his family had been attacked in a hotel car park while being on a holiday in Wales. The e-mail pleaded the contacts to transfer amount worth £1480 through Western Union money transfer.

Commenting on the matter, Mr. Perham, who has travelled a lot across the globe for his work, stated that a numerous phone calls starting coming to him when a UK based friend had called him to check that he was fine, as reported by times-age during the last week of November 2010.

Consequently, there was a flood of calls from Beijing, Hong Kong, Munich, and Australia during all morning hours.

John was absolutely blank and was not aware how his account got compromised. He immediately opted for discussing the matter with Google, which harbored the e-mail address, to block the address.

He commented that there were certain indications in the e-mail that could be recognized to prove that it was bogus, for example, USA was inappropriately spelt.

Remarkably, scams or frauds of such nature are also known as Nigerian scams or advance fee-fraud scams by the security experts. These scams are also called Nigerian scams because these kinds of bogus e-mails usually crop up in Nigeria.

Nowadays, these scams are not just only confined to Nigeria but are also prevalent in whole of Africa to various other nations.

Security experts commented that according to the statistics at the global level, the Nigerian scam because of its simple identifying ability and its reliance on probability has been on a decline on the back of increasing awareness. Still, on an annual basis, almost 50 thousand netizens are victimized by such attacks.

Finally, users are suggested that if they have been already victimized by such attacks, there are many official complaint websites and cyber crime cells in their nearby cities, so that they can file their complaints there, furnishing complete details to them regarding the transactions.

Related article: Email Security – A Big Challenge to Companies & Individuals

» SPAMfighter News - 12/9/2010