Another Internet Romance Scam

Below is another romance scam alert by one of our visitors:

Okay, another romance con artist going by the name of Desmond Cliff, attracts Singaporean females. He claims he is Alaskan, been living in California, and outstationed in Sabah, Malaysia. Works for Chase company. Wife died of childbirth, both parents had died, and only brother left. He is in Badoo.com, facebook and also yahoo messenger. From his accent and spelling and words use, one can tell a little later, that he is not American. Americans don't use 'severally', nor say 'back' as 'buk'.. only UKs and Nigerians do that. Be careful. His stories will look so real when it comes to asking you to help him financially. He would tell you how he got help from others first, and then you are his last resort. How he needed just that much left. I was a victim. Glad it wasn't so much but I am still threatening him to repay me back. Learned my lesson with all this wealth of information on the net. Also, everybody in US will be listed in PeopleSearch, so check out first. Be careful out there.

Sorry reporters, this victim did not leave any contact behind as well.

Assistance for CNA Documentary on Scams

Third Floor Pictures is working on a crime documentary for Channel News Asia - examining cons and scams. If anyone has fallen for these frauds, we'd like to work with them and share their story. We can assure absolute anonymity. They can e-mail me at khai at thirdfloorpictures dot com with their name and contact number or call me in the office at 64387169.

Above is an appeal from a very friendly guy, Khai, from the company "Third Floor Pictures".

Your kind assistance will be greatly appreciated. If you were a victim, we are sure that you do not wish more people to fall for the same fraud.

Chain Mail Forwarding Scams

Chain mail has begun as early as the use of email has existed. They begun with scams threatening you that if you do not forward to a number of friends, something bad will happen to you. Then, some very nasty people invented scams like the following:

Dear : All,

Hello, My name is Krista Marie and I have a new born baby named Natalie.

She means the world to me, and just recently, the doctors have discovered that my little Natalie has "Brain Cancer."

Unfortunatly my husband and I don't have the money to pay for the bill.

But my husband and I have worked out a deal with AOL and they have agreed to give us 5 cents to each person that received this e-mail.

So please, forward this to everyone you know, and help out my little Natalie and I.

Thank you.

Your Sincere :
Krista Marie

* This is NOT a joke e-mail, this is regarding to save a new Life. Please dtake this message seriously. Thank you!

We do not know if Krista Marie and Natalie are real people. However, the whatever "deal" with AOL is definitely a scam because there is no way AOL can know if anyone has received the forwarded email, at least not by sending the image as an attachment. The number of viewers may be tracked if the image is being hosted by AOL and is embedded as HTML inside the email.

We strongly despise scammers who create such prank since it will greatly kill the morale of kind souls in the world.

Fake Distributor Online Scam

The emerging of internet has helped many businessmen to reach target audience easier. Selling products online means there is no need for a physical store, which will help to ease the business cost since rental is usually the biggest component.

However, there is an issue of reliability at stake. Many scammers have emerged to harvest in the large market with fake or imitation products, which are usually of lousier quality than the actual manufacturers'.

It is often difficult to trace the sellers when the online buyers face issues with the products.

In our opinion, it is worth the risk to try out non-consumable and non facial products; on the other hand, we should always exercise extra care in identifying the sellers' credibility. For products that you will put into your mouth or apply on your skin, you probably have to research more.

There is a compaint from a beauty products distributor that someone has been using her name to sell the products, which are supposed to be sold only through her.

"注意：很多卖家利用我们的名誉说是我们的代理和我们拿货，但是她们根本不是我们的代理却说是跟我们拿货。我们并不是他们的代理商。大家请小心！"

We do not know if these products really work. Our primary concern is that if you were to get them from unauthorized distributors, there is a high chance that they are counterfeit goods, which may harm your health. Secondly, if anything happens, you may not be able to pursue the matter if you get the products from an unknown online fake distributor.

It is therefore better for you to get any product from the appropriate distributor instead of getting them at discounted price from unknown distributors or people who claim to be representing the distributor.

A decent product that is allowed to be sold online should at least have a decent company website. Do check with them for more information when you are in doubt.

Beggar Scams - PRC Old Lady

Translated from Chinese (pardon us if there is any mistake):

"Daughter is suffering from Leukemia"

"Female beggar makes a hundred dollar per hour"

"Came to Singapore from China and is being accused of gaining sympathy"

A few weeks ago, there was this news of a PRC lady who was begging on the street. We are not sure if she is genuine about her sick daughter even though many people think that it is weird for her to be able to afford the air ticket to travel from China.

Like what we have mentioned in one of our entries about the begging scam, passers-by should help the poor in the long run by contacting the town council, member of parliament or MCYS to help them. If you give a person a fish, he can live for a few days, but if you teach him how to fish, he can live for many years.

Call From Number +65333458 Scam

We have just received a call from the number +65333458.

"+65" is the country code for Singapore, which means if someone uses a phone line to call you in Singapore, "+65" will be displayed at the front.

The person who called had an Indian accent, who spoke very fast and was recommending us to get a free package or gift from "Bank of China".

As he continued to shoot nonsense, we took a look at the phone number and realised it was very weird. If we were to break down the number into country code and phone number, "+65" and "333458", the phone number was different from the normal 8-digit Singapore number - it was just 6 digits.

We knew something was wrong and regretted even picking up the call. As we said "Sorry, I'm not interested", the fellow ignored us and continued to recommend his product until slamming his phone.

Lesson learnt for the day is that phone number that appears on the caller ID can be faked like email - we have heard about it before but the "+65" in front is really tricky. We hope nobody is tempted by whatever free package or gift.

We are not sure what kind of scam they are trying their luck on, however, companies that fake number are obviously up to no good.

Blog Comment Spam Scam

If you own a blog, whether it is hosted on free Blogger or WordPress, or even on your own webhost, you will somehow receive comments on your blog post. Depending on the popularity of your blog, you may receive more.

Generally, having many comments mean your blog is interesting or popular, however, if most of the comments are actually nonsense, your blog will look rather ugly.

What do we mean by comments which are nonsense or spammy (we mean "spam" in an act-cute way)?

Some blog comments may sound logical but they are simply general comments that can be applied to almost all blogs. Examples would be:

1. Comments that thank or praise you for your contents and they definitely will not mention which part is good because they are being automatically generated.
2. Comments that tell you your blog is good but has problem when being displayed on certain internet browser.
3. Comments that ask you for your RSS URL when it is already being shown clearly on top of your blog.
4. Comments that advise you to include RSS so that visitors can get updates easier when you already have RSS for your blog.

Some comments may also be lengthy but the contents are on certain topics that are totally irrelevant to your blog entry or even your entire blog. Other comments are obviously spams that contain only links to other websites.

Regardless of the type of spam comment, they will contain at least an URL of the website that the spammer (scammer) owns. The URL can be included as part of the comment or at the bottom of it, or simply on the "website" column allowed by your blog. Most of the time, the "name" of the comment owner will be the product or website's name, and sometimes, but rarely, is a human's name.

Take a look at the following blog comment:

Hello, Neat post. There's an issue together with your website in internet explorer, may check this? IE nonetheless is the marketplace leader and a large section of other folks will leave out your excellent writing due to this problem.

The spam blog comments are obviously scams.

Most of the scam comments are automatically generated by software. Most of them are also randomly generated using certain sets of words.

What do we mean by sets of words?

For example, The first set of words can be "He, She, It, Luckie", second set "is, is indeed, has" and third set "a dog, dog, a puppy, puppy". When the software spins the sets of words and creates a spun sentence or paragraph, it can turn out to be a combination of the sets of words, for examples, "It is indeed dog", "She has dog" or "He is a puppy". Generally, the sentences do make sense but may not be in perfect English. We have already been living in the internet life where most people do not type in proper English anyway - this includes our blog (We will try our best to do it better though!).

The scam blog comments are created for free advertisement and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) purposes.

If you were to approve the scam comments to appear on your website, your visitors may click on the URL included or you may even click on it yourself to see what is it all about - this will create extra traffic for the scammers' websites. As for SEO, search engine's spiders and bots may misunderstand that the scammers' websites are popular because their URLs are appearing on other websites - this is also the reason why the scammers would want to spin the contents of the scam comment to make them look differently.

Some very hardworking kiddy scammers would do the spamming manually because those software to do it do cost some high monthly subscription fees.

By the way, there are also some scam comments that actually do not include an URL or they would simply add "google.com" or "yahoo.com" as their URLs. This is just a trick for you to approve the comments, thinking there is no harm. Eventually, the scammers are just trying their luck that your blog's system would add their IP or email address to the whitelist, so that their future scam blog comments may be automatically accepted depending on your system. Therefore, we would advise you to do manual moderation of comments for your blog instead of allowing whitelist.

We should not allow scammers to have their ways. Let's be alert and block these scammers.