How should I interpret this?

Post Reply New Topic

From: _________
To: Merit
Posted: Thu Apr 28, 2011 11:04 am
Subject: how are you

Dearest One,
My name is _______ i saw your profile today and became intrested in you,i will also like to know you more,and i want you to send an email to my email address so i can give you my picture for you to know whom i am.Here is my email address(_____________)
i believe we can move from here.I am waiting for your mail to my email address above._______(Remeber the distance or colour does not matter but love matters alot in life Yours Love
_______ ( ____________ )

I don't know whether this person is intentionally trying to be creepy, or if they just want to be friends... but I have never seen them on the forums, and a site search of their username came up with nothing. But I don't want to jump to conclusions, so what do you guys think? Internet predator? They don't even tell me if they are male or female. I've never talked to them before, obviously. I just don't understand it.

The syntax and word choice sound a lot like a Nigerian scam e-mail to me. I used to collect the things, because I was getting so many at one of my e-mail addresses. And one of the variants is to pretend to be someone seeking "love". It's a social engineering type of thing; you're supposed to be so flattered you let your guard down. They have a lot of experience at stringing people along, and then, sooner or later, they either ask for money, or for information they can use to steal your money.

I don't know that is what this message is, but with that syntax and word choice, and the very generic way it is phrased (they don't want to waste time learning any details about you unless you turn out to be one of the ones that "bite" - so they blast out thousands of these things an hour), I'd be pretty surprised if that isn't it. And I did read something on here a while back about various spam / scam messages on here. Maybe you could ask the admins to check it out for you, see what they can learn about the account.

I think it is a scam or something, because I just got sent the exact same e-mail again, like it was cut+paste.

How do I contact the administrators here?

It might be cut and paste, or they might be using a simple bot to push them out. Either way, you could post on the Administration board (and I should have looked there before, sorry; see the fourth pinned topic down), or look for a moderator and PM them. The last I checked, Moog was a mod. I can't think of anyone else offhand. Well, Alex, the site owner...

You can post your concerns in this thread to grab the moderators attention

http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt158661.html