Be Safe, It’s an Internet Frauds

We often receive emails from known and unknown sources asking for some favor or proposal. Internet fraud is a term used frequently to describe the fraudulent activities performed using the Internet as a medium. It is very easy to hide your identity and initiate the crime seating 1000 of miles away. This is generally propagated like the virus and takes a form of banking scam. The scam can be of many schemes as listed below 

Estimates of the total losses due to the scam vary widely since many people may be too embarrassed to admit that they were gullible enough to be scammed to report the crime. In addition to the financial cost, many victims also suffer a severe emotional and psychological cost, such as losing their ability to trust people. One man from Cambridgeshire, UK, committed suicide by lighting himself on fire with petrol after realizing that the $1.2 million “internet lottery” that he won was actually a scam.

Before it’s too late let us understand how such scams are triggered. In this blog, I am going to discuss how Business proposal scam leads to financial loss and ways to identify and mitigates the same. 

I received the below email which has a very impressive offer.Let's analyze the mail.

Email Message 

Mail from Alice Farah farah_alice@voila.fr via yahoo.com 

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Dear Friend.

Greetings to you and your family, I am the manager of bill and exchange in THE BANK, I have a business of 5.5 Million United State Dollars to be transfer to your account for investment in your country, if you are ready to assist me get back to me, I will give you full details on how the fund will be transfer to you.

Be rest assured that everything will be handled confidentially because, this is a great opportunity we cannot afford to miss, as it will make our family profit a lot.

It has been 6 years go, that most of the greedy African Politicians used our bank to launder money overseas through the help of their Political advisers.

Most of the funds which they transferred out of the shores of Africa were gold and oil money that was supposed to have been used to develop the continent.

The Political advisers always inflated the amounts before transfer to foreign accounts so I also used the opportunity to divert part of the fund worth five million five hundred united state dollars I told you about and I am aware that there is no official trace of how much was transferred as all the accounts used for such transfers of fund at that particle time were closed after transfer.

I am the account officer to most of the politicians and when I discovered that they were using me to succeed in their greedy act, I also cleaned some of their banking records from the Bank files and no one cared to ask me for the money was too much for them to control, as I am sending this message to you, I was able to divert five point five Millions Dollars ($5.5M)which is in an escrow transit account belonging to no one in the bank, and now my bank is very anxious to know the real beneficiary of the funds is for they have made a lot of profits with the fund.

It has been more than five years ago and most of the politicians are no longer in power again and they don’t use our bank to transfer funds overseas anymore since their tenure had expired.

The $5.5 Million United State Dollars has been lying in the bank as unclaimed fund and I will soon retire from the bank immediately the fund is transfer into your account over there.

Immediately the fund has been successfully transfer into your account I will come to your country for the sharing of the fund, the fund will be shared 50% for me and 40% for you, and the other 10% for the orphanages home and poor with less-privilege people.

Please know that there is no one that is going to question you about the fund if you will comply with me and follow my instruction which will help us a lot to achieve this goal for everything is well secured.

Please indicate your interest in this transaction by replying back through my private email
and if you are not interested do not waste your time to reply kindly delete my message from your box ok.

Waiting to hear from you soon.

Yours Faithfully,
Mrs. Alice Farah.

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The best way to analyze the mail is to read the message header, which gives all the information i.e. when this mail was originated, source address, Number of hops or the device it has passed thru and so on. The below snippet shows a message header, which needs to be read from bottom in a chronological manner.

Message Header 

Please click on the below image for better resolution.

If you look at the full header information of the email you will most likely see a different reply to and/or return-path, which is the spammers email address. In our case Reply-To: alicefarah5@voila.fr is different then Return-Path: p.godpower@yahoo.com. So that means it’s a spam mail!!!The “From” address can be spoofed with your friend email address as well.

Now, let’s identify the origin of this mail. After analyzing the above message header you can get the below matrix showing how this message has transverse from different network and system. So that’s means the message you send over the internet can be tracked easily and necessary actions can be taken 

From	To	Time received
41.203.233.236	web161306.mail.bf1.yahoo.com [Web]	8/19/2013 7:06:33 PM
127.0.0.1	omp1005.mail.bf1.yahoo.com [Yahoo NNFMP]	8/19/2013 7:06:33 PM
98.139.212.196	tm12.bullet.mail.bf1.yahoo.com [Yahoo NNFMP]	8/19/2013 7:06:33 PM
98.139.215.141	nm47.bullet.mail.bf1.yahoo.com [Yahoo NNFMP]	8/19/2013 7:06:34 PM
nm47-vm1.bullet.mail.bf1.yahoo.com.	mx.google.com [ESMTPS] [Google]	8/19/2013 7:06:34 PM
	10.224.160.130 [SMTP] [Google]	8/19/2013 7:06:34 PM
	10.52.155.4 [SMTP] [Google]	8/19/2013 7:06:34 PM

The origin of this message is from IP Address - 41.203.233.236.If you perform Whois IP Address lookup the below detail can be obtained. 

person:         Emmanuel GUIGMA

nic-hdl:        EG4-AFRINIC

address:        ONATEL, 01 P.O. BOX 10 000

address:        Ouagadougou 01

address:        Burkina Faso

address:        OUAGADOUGOU 01 BP 10000

address:        Burkina Faso

e-mail:         guigma@onatel.bf

phone:          +22650305847

fax-no:         +22650315386

source:    AFRINIC # Filtered 

It shows the origin of this message is from Africa.

Be safe and Please don't provide your personal details to such mail.