Thursday, October 13, 2011

Recent Email from a Friend's Account

Someone claiming to be my friend and writing from my friend's account wrote:
We're writing this with tears.My family and i made a quick trip to Madrid Spain on a short vacation and we got mugged at the park of hotel where we stayed. Worse of it was that our bags, cash and credit cards were all stolen at GUNPOINT leaving us penniless right now.

It's was a horrible experience for us and we need help flying back home,the authorities are not being 100%  supportive but the good thing is that we still have our passports. we need some cash to settle our bills and get on flight back home. please let us know if you can help.

We're freaked out at the moment..
 
[name of victim and his wife]

Now, I know for a fact this friend is perfectly well and sitting at home on the other side of the world.  There's no possible way this email is true.  It's the work of someone resourceful attempting to trick my friend's friends into sending money under false pretenses.  It's fraud.  Very serious and disturbing fraud.

It's not as bad fraud as claiming to be the earthly head of Christ's church, but it's fraud nonetheless.

Beware!

-TurretinFan

2 comments:

Natamllc said...

TF,

sadly, I can cite three people I know of personally who got hooked into such fraud!

I receive countless emails making offers that tug at my emotions or my sinful nature and blind my common sense.

The only sense I can make of it comes from one verse that seems, by itself, to be why someone falls for these fraudulent appeals and are defrauded by them?

1Co 13:7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Each of these persons I reference were, one, Christian men, two, somewhat intelligent, either a Pastor and one of the three was, in fact, an FBI agent/friend who gave about $175,000,00 to the fraud!

Being persuaded by the emotions without being disciplined to "proof" all things before acting on the appeal that is stirring the emotions seems to be what it is that triggers the trap and traps the trapped by the appeal.

Dan Holmes said...

I recently got one of these emails from somebody in my church. The main lesson to learn from this is to keep your email address as secure as possible and have a password with numbers/symbols, because there are computer programs out there that try to guess easy passwords and get a hold of people's email addresses.