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Eons ago I blogged on newer a style of scam from a company called “Grambest International”. You can see the blog here.

It was a quickie blog which I put together, and I moved on, promptly forgetting about the whole thing.

Today, out of curiosity, I checked what search terms were being used to get to the site. What was the one of the top ones? Grambest International. People are obviously getting the letter, and then searching for the company, and finding our earlier blog.

It is good to see people using Google to check on a potential business partner. It also highlights that these fraudsters are pushing up their efforts to lure innocents in to their scams.

Here’s what’s incredible to me. This thing is an old spam. But the email addresses in that spam are STILL ACTIVE. I can’t believe they have not been turned off. I sent an email under an assumed name and got this nice reply:

Dear ….:

Thank you very much for your response and your interest in this transaction. You should have nothing to worry about as there shall be no financial requirements from your side.

This is how it works, all our customers within your locality (USA, CANADA and UK as the case may be) will be directed to you for payment. Note that they pay in cheque and your work as our representative is to cash this cheque, deduct the 10% from it and the balance made payable into our designated account that will be sent to you later.

However, you are to provide us with your contact details stating your full names, postal/residential address and your phone number. This details will be given to our different customers for the necessary contact for payment. And you will also be required to send any form of identification, either a work ID or an international passport if any. We need this to enable us have complete congnizance of whom we are dealing with.

We hope to hear from you as soon as you receive this correspondence.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Mr William Mark
President.
+447040112294

Friends in the UK? Don’t hesitate to report this criminal to the appropriate authorities…

Now here’s what’s crazy: A few weeks back, I got a fraud email. Inside the email, was an email address to contact for “further details”. I notified the ISP that was hosting the email account that this person was a fraudster. Note that the email itself was not from the ISPs network. But the email address within the email was on the ISPs network.

They just couldn’t figure it out. Wouldn’t go into their automated abuse systems. For all I know, that email address is still active. So the ISP has, by their robotic automated forms, allowed this scam to continue and, in my eyes, are culpable in the continuation of the scam.

Why aren’t the ISPs cracking down on this junk?

Alex Eckelberry