By Jeremy D. Wells
Carter County Times
Scams, threats, and phishing schemes are nothing new on the internet. Variations on the pyramid scheme and other cons that predated the world wide web and email popped up almost as soon as the technology made it possible.
By now we’re all familiar with the Nigerian prince, who just needs our help – in the form of access to a bank account with a certain level of funds already deposited – to get his money out of the country. We’ve all gotten the emails from a solicitor for a long lost uncle, who passed with no direct heirs, and needs our banking information to deposit our inheritance.
We know these are scams.
Even when the details change, the basics of the scams are the same. You either put up some money, so they can get money or goods out of the country, to be paid back with interest. (It’s never paid back.) Or you give them access to your account so they can deposit funds you’re entitled to. (They withdraw the funds instead.)
This week I saw a new variation on that, one that pulls at the heart strings and appeals to basic human decency rather than a desire to “get rich quick.” But it does so with facts that are demonstrably wrong.
I received two versions of this email, within hours of each other, with different names and details but an identical premise; a family, trapped in eastern Ukraine, and desperate for escape. In both emails the writer – a supposed father of elementary school children – claimed that Russian shelling was going on within feet of their home or their “child’s kindergarten.” That exact phrase, about the kindergarten, was the first thing to jump out at me as I perused the two emails. As I looked closer I noticed other similarities. Both said they needed to pay smugglers to get their family to safety, in Poland or Hungary, and that they needed to pay them in Bitcoin specifically. Neither promised any return, but asked only for assistance, “anything you can afford,” to help their families.
The thing is, while Putin has ordered troops into breakaway regions of Ukraine, which he announced Russia would recognize, as I write this article, at the time these emails were sent, no legitimate media sources were reporting any sort of military conflict.
By the time this paper reaches your doorstep or the newsstands, Russia may well be engaged in military conflict with Ukraine. But the conflict cited in the email was not documented at the time the emails were sent. So the scam here is relying on more than one type of misinformation. It’s also playing on our distrust of media. If the email sender were questioned, they would undoubtedly say something like Russian troops were suppressing media coverage and western media sources were simply unaware.
It’s an easy enough scam to pick apart, but it somehow feels more offensive to me than claiming to represent a long lost uncle, or to be a rogue African prince, because rather than taking advantage of our greed, it’s trying to take advantage of our basic human decency.
With this in mind, it was almost refreshing to get an old-fashioned strong-arm threat. Or, at least, a strong-arm threat of the cyber variety.
The other email that was new to me was one insisting that I provide links on our cartercountytimes.com website to their clients product, as well as positive reviews of the product (CBD gummies and oils), or else they would review bomb our site.
The writer, who claims to work for a search engine optimization company located in Bangladesh, first requests “a permanent backlink” for his client and an email in return confirming that I linked to the address on our page.
It went to ask if I would “plz” (please) create a five-star rating on two other platforms I am unfamiliar with.
“If I do not see a backlink in one week, I am creating a million toxic blog comment spam and redirect backlink to cartercountytimes.com and you can say goodbye to your Google rankings for 1 year or more. I trust you are making the correct decision Sir.”
If I cave to their threat, I get a link back on the client’s site though, so that’s a plus, I suppose.
My favorite is how the writer ends it with “Best wishes from sunny Bangladesh.”
I mean, if you are going to make threats, you can at least do it politely, right?
I suspect that the links in the message are probably to sites riddled with malware and spyware, but I won’t be clicking on them to find out.
I’ll take my chances with the year of “toxic blog comments” instead.
Jeremy D. Wells can be reached at editor@cartercountytimes.com
