Individual Entry

 
What will they think of next?

From time to time, most of us receive the odd email scam, asking us to send our credit card details or passwords to various unsavoury individuals, many of them residing in Nigeria. The Scam Baiter web site catalogues many such instances, and the fun that can be had at these unscrupulous crooks’ expense. Now, I’d like to think that most people possess enough intelligence not to hand over their personal details when asked for them by an unknown party, but perhaps I just have too much faith in humanity. Either way, you do get the odd semi-convincing email: for example, when you’re purporting to be from Barclay’s Bank, it helps if you have the organisation’s logo somewhere in your message and your email address isn’t provided by Hotmail or Yahoo. Most of the time, however, these scams are so laughably inept that it’s almost tempting to suggest that whoever gets taken in by them deserves what they get. Here’s an absolute corker I received yesterday:

Dear Email Account Owner,

We would like to inform you that we are currently carrying out scheduled maintenance and upgrade of our webmail service and we changing our mailhost server as a result your original password will be reset. We are sorry for any inconvenience caused.

To complete your ntlworld.com email account, you must enter your password here (*********)
and reply to this email (upgrade.account.dept@googlemail.com) to enable us update our data base.

Failure to do this

Unfortunately, it cuts off there, so I have absolutely no idea what the consequences of me not telling this random stranger my email account password will be. I’m shaking in my boots!