Attorney latest victim of Nigerian Email Scam
Photo by: Ktylerconk
Colorado Attorney Jim McDonough suffered recently at the hands of a caustic Nigerian email scam. The scam perpetuates a new genre that seeks out victims with a high profile. McDonough became a victim when fraudsters hacked into his personal computer and used his personal email-id to send distress emails asking for money.
The scam got on its feet when it successfully downloaded malware onto McDonough’s computer. Over a period of time, the malware spied and collected passwords submitted by the attorney online. It struck gold when access codes for his personal email account came by its way.
The scam then made up an email featuring a cock-and-bull story about the attorney. He was on a visit to Nigeria - it said - when bad times had caught up with him. As it happened, he had just been mobbed on the street and was presently left stranded in that country. Hence, he was urgently in need of around $3000 to clear his hotel bills and to pay for his way home. Any money that anybody can wire across would be welcome and would be gratefully returned upon his homecoming. This email was sent to all contacts stored in the hacked email account.
It would be natural for recipients of the emails to be caught in two minds on receiving them. Coming as it does (issued from his personal email id) they would find it hard to ignore the plea. To help tilt things in their favor, the fraudsters also got hold of a prototype of the attorney’s letter head and used it with the mail. That would be enough for most people to dash across $100.
The attack showed remarkable sophistry. All the messages were sent from the victim’s own computer from right under his nose; probably when he was working online. Moreover, it must have breached a few layers of security to accomplish the hack.
In such scams what also buys time for fraudsters is the fact that the victims either would never know their account had been compromised or they would get to know of it too late. After all, they wouldn’t know of it until somebody came along inquiring how their trip to Nigeria ended!
Source: 9News.com
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December 26th, 2008 at 10:56 am
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