I’ve been spotting bogus emails and phone calls for quite a while now and I’d thought I’d seen everything. I got this bogus/scam email tonight that is different than anything else I’ve seen:
Date: Thu, 01 Mar 2012 20:00:00 -0500
From: ~ GB ~ g.barbaruolo@comcast.net
To: yaddayaddayadda at gmail.com
Subject: Re: For sale adHi Mark, I ran across your ad, do you still have the Neuros MPEG-4 Video Recorder 2 for sale?
Thanks,
Tom
Looks innocent enough, right? I was seconds away from sending a reply, telling “Tom” that he was in luck because I have the item, but something seemed … odd. It had been a long time – years even – since I’d posted an ad for this item. Why was he writing me now, knowing the odds that it was available after three years were pretty low? Also, why was he writing directly to my Gmail account, when Craigslist obscures the ad poster’s email address? Did he get my email address from Craigslist, or did he get it from somewhere else?
I decided to do a Google search on “Neuros MPEG-4 Video Recorder 2″ and then one on “Neuros MPEG-4 Turner” to narrow it down to any ads I might have placed. Sure enough, I found the ad I placed on the TriLUG email list back in December 2008:
(more…)
