E-Mail Scams: Fill & Download for Free

Lonelygirl15:One of the most popular Internet hoaxes in recent years, the lonelygirl15 teenager named Bree turned out to be nothing more than an actress named Jessica Rose. The YouTube sensation assuredly broke many lonely hearts who thought they shared a special connection with the web cam princess, the show is still going strong with an average of 70 million viewers, all of whom (hopefully) now know that lonelygirl15 isn’t real.Disney Hoax:Could you imagine receiving a real live e-mail from Walt Disney, Jr. himself? Well, we couldn’t either, but enough people did to make this Disney hoax a real problem. The fraudulent e-mail claims to work with Bill Gates and Microsoft to try out a new e-mail tracing program. The e-mail asks people to forward the e-mail to as many people as possible, and “if it reaches 13,000 people, 1,300 of the people on the list will receive $5,000, and the rest will receive a free trip for two to Disney World for one week during the summer of 1999 at our expense.”Internet Wedding Scam:Irish and Scottish folk singer Marc Gunn posts on his website a warning for other musicians about the Internet Wedding scam. A person claiming to be a soon-to-be married man named Pitt Andre wanted to book Gunn’s band at their wedding. Agreeing to pay the 50% deposit upfront, the scammer instead sent a check for nearly double the amount, and then asked for a refund making up the difference. A couple of days later, the man e-mailed Gunn to tell him the wedding was off, and that he wanted all of the money back. According to Gunn, the first check “seemed to have cleared” after three days, and his group sent back the $2500. Of course, the original check inevitably bounced, leaving Gunn and his group “miserable…and $2500 poorer.”Killer Bananas:In 2000, an Internet hoax about imported bananas containing flesh eating bacteria that “spread faster than the flu,” according to Kathy Means, vice-president of the Produce Marketing Association. Despite efforts to squash the rumor, people panicked, inciting investigative stories in the LA Times and from the Knight Ridder news service.Don’t Pump Gas on May 15:In May of 2007, an e-mail hoax pleaded with American drivers, “Don’t pump gas on May 15!” The hope was that large oil companies would suffer great financial losses if millions of people refused to fuel up on one single day. An article on CNN reveals that “the chain e-mail urging the gas boycott has been around for several years, surfacing most years in the springtime” and that “many of the numbers in the e-mail are either misleading or flat out wrong.”Bill Gates Hoax:Poor Bill Gates has found himself involved in another e-mail scam, this time with AOL. As with the Disney hoax, people are rewarded for passing along the chain e-mail in $5.00, $3.00, and $1.00 increments. No Disney vacation included in this one, though.KFC Hoax:Despite what this Internet hoax wants you to believe, the Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise does not genetically engineer chicken-related organisms to maximise the amount of meat collected from each creature. This disgusting scam attempt to explain why Kentucky Fried Chicken is now referred to as just KFC, “because they can not use the word chicken anymore. Why? KFC does not use real chickens.”Facebook millions:Well-meaning Facebook users forwarded a status update in 2015, in the hope that Mark Zuckerberg would share his fortune with users of the site. This was outed as a hoax within days, but not before the fake promise had spread like wildfire all over the site.Snowball the Monster Cat:You wouldn’t believe a photo of an oversized cat if it was published on the front cover of National Enquirer, would you? If that’s the case, we’re wondering why so many people believed the picture of an 87-pound monster cat that surfaced on the Internet. Unbelievably, the photo was even talked about on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and Good Morning America. Supposedly, the cat’s mother was rescued after being found “abandoned near a Canadian nuclear lab” in Canada; however, the cat’s owner admitted to doctoring the photo and starting the hoax.Dead Fairy Hoax:“If you believe in fairies, then clap your hands!” As with Tinker Bell, clapping your hands won’t bring these little garden fairies back to life, probably because they never existed. An Englishman created and photographed small models of dead and mummified fairies to trick people into believing that fairies once existed. After e-mailing the pictures to friends as an April Fools’ joke, fairy lovers all over the world continue to believe that the photos are real, “even though [the] creator has long since admitted to the hoax.”

You may have gotten the infamous blackmail fishing e-mail, that claims they have information on you and will send it to your friends, your neighbors, your parents, your pastor, your goldfish, the squirrel that lives in your roof, and your garbagemen unless you send them bitcoin.This is a scam. In some cases they’ll scare the hell out of you with a password that you may have used in the past; these passwords are scraped from password hacks, as has happened to Adobe and Yahoo among others.Ignore, don’t pay, don’t worry; you aren’t actually being blackmailed.

The overwhelming number of scam e-mails that have spelling and grammar mistakes hints at a very simple explanation: they are intentional.A scam e-mail fraud usually consists of a series of replies exchanged with the potential victim.The less gullible the potential victim, the more likely it is for him or her to figure out the trick before the scam is completed.But if they do figure it out, and not from the very first moment (the e-mail), it means the scammer’s time gets wasted.So for a scammer it’s more efficient to weed out the people that are a “flight” risk, by simply offering them obvious clues. Only the most gullible people will take that e-mail for something real and serious, so they will pass through the filter as candidates with a much higher potential of paying up in the end.