Unofficial Christ's Hospital Forum

All Old Blues using this forum should be aware of a scam, as follows.
The scam consists of an e-mail which arrives out-of-the-blue (no pun intended), purportedly from a person known to the recipient. The text varies slightly, but the gist is that the sender is abroad and has lost his/her money and cards, and needs a short-term loan to enable them to return to the UK. The sum stated is usually either £1,000 or £2,000 (nice round figures) and there is a firm promise to repay it immediately on return to the UK. The e-mail also helpfully includes details of how to transfer the sum abroad.
The reason I am posting this here is that I have now received six of these messages over the past three years and in every case they have come from Old Blues. In four of the cases the purported senders were people with whom I have exchanged only a very few e-mails; in two cases we exchange e-mails fairly regularly. The messages are well-written and at first sight appear genuine. I have spoken to four of the purported senders, all of whom were in the process of receiving numerous similar calls - and one of those, not an experienced computer user, was in considerable distress. I should add that I have never received any similar messages from non-Old Blues.
I have spoken to CHOBA about this and they have consulted CH IT department, who say that there is nothing they can do about it. All they can advise is to immediately delete these messages (UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES OPEN ANY ATTACHMENTS OR SEEK TO ANSWER IT BY CLICKING ON 'REPLY'.) You should then try to inform the purported sender what has happened, preferably by telephone.
My understanding is that the purported sender has no knowledge that his/her computer has been infected in this way and thus has absolutely no responsibility for the transmission.
If anyone has any idea of how to deal with this, it would be helpful if they posted it here.
David

This is a very old scam and not restricted to Old Blues; the messages could be "from" just about anyone you know. I must have seen close on a hundred in my working life though the reason for asking for money can vary. I've even seen one from somebody known to the six feet under!



My wife worked for Ford and recently received just such a message from one of her managers claiming that his wallet had been stolen in London and he needed money to pay his hotel bill. The fraudster had done some good homework indication that the manger was visiting London on holiday which is understandable since he lives in Spain; we did not respond and Foureyes' advice is as good as you can get.

How to deal with it?
1. The Met did have a team working on such scams but even 15 years ago they were overloaded; my contact has since retired so I doubt if the police would be of any help (except perhaps recording the event and, when they get enough from the same fraudster, trying to trace someone in Nigeria, Georgia, Ukraine or any one of 200 other countries).
2. Get good and updated anti virus and trojan programs ( some of the best are actually free to download and use) AND use a couple at the same time.
3. If you want to help ALWAYS contact your acquaintance by phone or, using your list of addresses, by email before answering the incoming message and NEVER EVER use the address of the message source or any address in the message (if that makes sense).