orphans, tsunamis and aged mothers

This page discusses email scams that appeal to the recipient's compassion rather than greed about sharing the scammer's supposed loot.

It covers -

• introduction
• baby it's cold out here
• tsunamis, quakes and other disasters

     introduction

Some scammers have preyed on the reader's good will, rather than greed, although again exploiting the victim's credulity and difficulty in establishing the truth. Email pleas to send blankets, warm clothing - or merely cash - are a contemporary version of letters that have circulated since at least the Middle Ages and newspaper advertisements that raised the ire of postal service inspectors over the past 150 years.

Typically the recipient is claimed to have been identified "through a friend", via a print directory or the net, or via an unidentified source. The sender seeks support for a worthy cause: an institution such as an orphanage or disaster relief organisation, an individual or a family that is beset by misfortune. The sender is located in another region or another nation: somewhere that is sufficiently exotic for claims to be plausible and sufficiently distant to prevent investigation by most recipients (or by authorities).

     baby it's cold out here

One example is the heart-wrenching plea we (and a large number of spam filters) received from a resident of Kaluga in Russia during December 2005

... I'm student and live with my mother in small city in Russia. My mother is invalide. She cannot see and she receive pension from the government very rare which is not enough even for medications. I work very hard every day to be able to buy the necessities and medications for my mother, but my salary is very small, because my studies still not finished. Due to the deep crisis, authorities stopped gas in our small district and we cannot heat our home anymore. I do not know what to do, because the weather is minus 11 degrees Celsius already and radio says it will be up to minus 25 during the next month. I'm very afraid that if the temperature will be lower than 0 degree in our sleeping room, we will not survive. I applied to local Red Cross and they explained me that many people ask them for help every day and they cannot help to each family. They adviced me to search help from individuals. Thanks to free Internet access in our municipal library, I found several addresses, including yours and I decided to appeal to you with a prayer in my heart for a small help. If you have any old used sleeping bag, warm blanket, warm clothing, portable heater, canned food, vitamins, water boiler, medicines against cold weather, any hygiene products, I will be very grateful you if you could send it to our home address:

... If you think that it would be better or easier for you to help with some money, please writes me back to my free e-mail ... and I will provide you with details how to send it safely, if you agree. This way to help is very good, because in this case I will be able to buy a portable stove and heat our home during the winter.

Alas, someone with the same name (or variants thereof) and using the same address had been spamming since at least 1999. In that year, as noted in an Italian investigative site, he claimed to be a penniless teacher. In 2002 it was

Please excuse me for any inconvenience caused by this message. I would never send a message like this, but our hopeless situation forces me to send it. ... I'm 20 years old and I'm a student. I live with my mother and brother in the city of Kaluga, Russia. We had two grandfathers, but they died during this year. My mother is an invalid. She cannot see and she receives an indemnity from the government very rare which is not enough even for supporting our lives. My brother is an invalid, too, since the accident happened 5 years ago. A big part of his body is paralized. The government does not pay any indemnity to him and to many other Russian invalids. Since several years I take care of my mother and brother. The Russian government does not help us because of the current crisis and the corruption in Russia. I have a small piece of land in the forest where I grow vegetables during the summer, but this summer was very hot and it was not raining, therefore all the vegetables became dried. I'm very afraid that the cold winter is setting in and my family has nothing to eat afterwards. This evening our weather is minus 19 degrees Celsius and it is going to be much more colder in the next month. It seems that all of us are doomed to the starvation and death. The only chance we have to survive is to use the free public access to the internet during the evening at the High School when it is possible. I have found several e-mail addresses, including yours, that is why I have decided to appeal to you directly for a small help. If you have anything that is possible to eat, as well as any old warm clothes which you are not using anymore, I would be more than happy if you could send it to our home address ...

By 2003 the ailing brother had disappeared from the message. Despite recurrent use of the name the plea was persuasive enough to gain some endorsement from sober, web-savvy readers in 2005 and will presumably do so in coming years.

     tsunamis, quakes and other disasters

Well-publicised natural disasters trigger a rash of spam that invites the generous to donate to fictitious or real charities and relief funds.

Following Hurricane Katrina, for example, the FBI noted a spam email soliciting donations of US$5 via credit card. The spam purported to come from support2@redcross.org, ie the American Red Cross, with a fake link to the RedCross.org site. In reality the link went to pro-solutions2.com/cgi-bin/register.pl, with donations (and credit card details) going to scammers rather than relief workers.

Similar scams have been identified after the

• 9/11 events in the US
• London underground bombings
• December 2004 Asian tsunami
• Darfur genocide
• 2002, 204 and 2005 coal mining disasters in China
• January 2006 Sago (West Virginia) mining accident

Formats vary from event to event. The Sago spam claimed to emanate from a physician at the hospital treating the sole survivor, soliciting money for further treatment and life after release from medical care. Others have claimed to come from

• the Australian, US or International Red Cross
• OxFam
• the Society of Friends
• the Red Crescent
• the Royal Blind Society
• the Australian Guide Dog Association
• American Cancer Society
• Australian Cancer Society
• National Heart Institute
  

     next page  (victims)