The Puppy Love Scam
A few weeks back I wrote about love scams ("You Give Love a Bad Name," WSJ.com) -- how scammers are trawling online dating sites looking for suckers. What interested me about the scam is that in some cases the scammers play a very patient game -- luring the mark in over a period of months before any sting is attempted.
Sophos, the antivirus people, say they have found a new twist on the same scam, where scammers are apparently luring folk by offering a puppy up for adoption:
The emails, which come from a husband and wife who claim to be on a Christian Mission in Africa say that their Yorkshire Terrier dog is not coping well in the hot weather.
Says Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos:
"The criminals are offering the pet puppy in an attempt to gather information from kind-hearted people who jump in to help. If you respond the scammers will try and steal confidential information about you, or sting you for cash. If you fall for a trick like this you'll be the one ending up in the doghouse."
Actually this is not quite new and not completely accurate. The LA Times wrote back in May about how the scam works:
People who responded to the ads eventually were asked to send hundreds of dollars to cover expenses such as shipping, customs, taxes and inoculations on an ever-escalating scale.
Some reported paying fees totaling more $1,500.
A piece in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette last week said the scam had been going across America for a year and points out that a Google search for "Nigerian Puppy Scam" turns up more than 200,000 "hits." (I must confess I found only 16,000.) Bulldogs and Yorkshire Terriers are favorites. The paper was apparently alerted to the scam when ads were found to be running in its own paper. A month earlier the Toronto Star reported that a local woman had parted with $500 for a 11-week old terrier, after responding to an ad on a free local classified site and complying with requests for three payments to ship the dog from Nigeria. (A reporter called up the scammer, who uttered the immortal scammer's words:
"Are you trying to call me a scam? I'm a family man," he said. "I am a man of God. I am a missionary."
For more detail on scams and how to spot them, check out this page on the IPATA website.
Dogs work because we love them, and are suckers for the sob story. What's interesting here -- and why these scams are in some ways more dangerous -- is that the scam does not play upon people's greed at all, but instead upon their charity and sense of decency.
Two conclusions from this:
- These scams are aimed at throwing a wider, and slightly different, net to the old scams. The victims are going to be people who are moral, not greedy.
- Chances are the scammers are aiming at making less money from these scams, but perhaps make up for it in volume. Perhaps the days are over when scammer aimed to make five-figure sums.
A search for Nigerian Puppy Scam on Google returned about 55,100 results while searching for "Nigerian Puppy Scam" (with quotes) resulted in 2830 results.
Even so, this still preys on people who care more about dogs than humans, and that's as bad as being greedy. I also like how most of these scams say they are "Christian" and so people fall for them without researching them, just like they fall for "Christianity" without researching it.
Posted by: Justin | October 08, 2008 at 01:31 AM