[Corpora-List] On Bill Louw's non-mugging

[Yorick Wilks]

I was "mugged in Madrid" a few months ago: 50 friends wrote to tell me they had received the spam letter, 5 said they would send money if it was true, and one, alas and who could afford it less than most, actually sent 1200 euros to Madrid (or probably indirectly to Nigeria). The interesting thing, which went beyond the experiences recounted in the Atlantic article, was that the scammer asked for MORE after he got he 1200 euros---saying he  was now at the airport but was being made to buy a travel bond or something.....increasingly implausible, but then so was the request for 1200 euros to fly Madrid to London! My scammed friend tried to keep him on email exchange while interpol could get to him but he was too quick and got away. I have been unable to decide--hence the relevance to the Corpora list--whether this is being done by NLP techniques or not. The Atlantic examples and the sheer volume of attempts and hacks--plus the brilliant personalization of the greetings and sign offs in the scam letters--suggests it is an application of clever NLP/corpus techniques, even if the later email interchange asking for more was not. If so, it's a very nice example of "malign NLP".
Yorick Wilks


On 18 Nov 2011, at 09:42, Bill Louw wrote:

> Dear All and Bill Fletcher
> 
> Thank you for this information. It was a dreadful experience and caused me to lose opportunities that would have been in my inbox at the time if it had not occurred. 
> 
> This whole matter is made worse by the fact that I have not been able to revive my gmail account :(
> 
> Best wishes
> 
> Bill Louw
> 
> --- On Fri, 18/11/11, William H Fletcher <fletcher at usna.edu> wrote:
> 
> From: William H Fletcher <fletcher at usna.edu>
> Subject: [Corpora-List] On Bill Louw's non-mugging
> To: "'The corpora list'" <corpora at uib.no>
> Date: Friday, 18 November, 2011, 14:29
> 
> Dear all (and especially Bill),
> 
> A few months ago there was quite a discussion on this list of an email sent
> from Bill Louw's GMail account reporting a mugging and asking for help.  In
> April something similar happened to Deb Fallows, whose husband Jim
> chronicles the attack, its likely source and possible ways to prevent such
> hijacking in the November 2011 issue of the Atlantic Monthly:
> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/hacked/8673/
> 
> His blog has various posts on this incident and prevention strategies, e.g.
> http://tinyurl.com/3b2c56b
> 
> Bill Fletcher
> 
> 
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