Saturday, February 23, 2008

Death threat spam

Wow, the spammers are really getting scary.

From WOAI:

The subject line of "Be More Careful" was enough to get one woman's attention. The rest of the letter was even more disturbing.

"Right then and there, I was real scared," she told us.

The woman asked to not be identified, but she showed us e-mails sent to her with death threats.

"Now, do you want to live or die as someone has paid us to kill you," she read from the e-mail. "Get back to me now, if you are ready to pay some fees to spare your life."

The letters said people were monitoring her every move and ordered her to reply to "Death Dealers RIP."

...

The woman contacted the police and an officer told her the e-mail most likely is a scam. The FBI tells us they are familiar with the e-mails and take them seriously.


Always, always delete e-mails if you don't recognize the sender. Spammers are a scourge, and we should all beware. If there truly is a person that is sending out fake death threats to get scared people to cough up some money, that person has crossed the line from slimy marketing to outright extortion.

5 comments:

Kels said...

That's insane! I generally glance through my spam box to make sure no "real" mail has filtered in there by accident.... other than that, all the other stuff gets deleted immediately... how weird, now I'm going to start noticing stuff like that too, probably

Anonymous said...

I had received this letter from deathdealerrip late last weekend and thought it was a spam "BUT" thought I'd play it safe because I have had a real death threat and had called the police!!! It was a coincidence because some of the things said in the email were said in the "REAL THREAT".If I was a scared mouse could you imagine what would have gone on???
The police are really upset because of these jerks!!
What an all time low!!!

Kels said...

Total sidenote, Edvard, but you gotta swing by my blog and watch the youtube video I posted. :) You'll laugh, you'll cry... you'll mostly laugh!

Albatross said...

Kels, that video was nice. A little "flashdancing" in the streets, maybe?

Anonymous said...

Got this one too and turned it over to the local police as well. I am usually good at ignoring griefers but this one started me and shook me up a little. Guess it is a good example of how we truly don't know how we will react until we actually go through it.