An email landed in our inbox today, and it wants our ears.
No, it doesn’t want us to lend them our ears. Rather it wants to cut them off. As the email goes on to explain, one of our competitors has paid the sender of the email a whopping £30,000 to take us out. Hitman style.
However, there is a way we can save ourselves. As the would-be assassin explains, we can save our skin by paying up £10,000 (via Bitcoin, naturally) and upon receipt of the money, the sender will call off the “hit”.
The email, in all its grammar nightmare glory, is below.
Read this post carefully, since it can be the last in your life.
People are by nature envious. Given the fact of successful development of your business, people (your competitors ) paid me 30,000 £ for your cutted ears.
It’s not the first time I’ve done this kind of work, but I’m already tired of these envious bastards and your life will be the last one I’ll take or will not do, it’s up to you.
Under normal circumstances, I would just do the work for which I was paid without going into the details, but I’m going to get away from it and go on a long-awaited vacation.
You have 2 versions for deciding this problem.
Accept my proposal or reject it.
You pay me 10 thousand GBP for safe your life and you receive all the information about the customer with whom you apply to the police and thus you save your life and the lives of your relatives.
The second option is you ignore my proposal and turn to the police, but by the same token you will only postpone your judgment day, even if I can not do the work, then somebody else will do it, not within a week and say in a month or half a year, but order for your head will be fulfilled sooner or later.
Thus, you will be afraid of every rustle, walk around looking and thinking that you are being persecuted.
If you want such a life, your choice, but if I were you, I would think very well.
Tickets to England have been taken for July 28, and you have exactly 3 days to transfer money to an anonymous account bitcoin redacted.
I can check the last time receipt of money before the flight to you, on the 28th
In the event of receiving a reward, I will not come to take your life, but will also pass all the information about your customer (Let the bastards get what they deserve) and you can protect yourself, otherwise you know the consequences.
The well-being of the future life depends on your choice.
Think about your life, you family.
Which one of our competitors, we wonder, wants us dead? Brett from Hoax-Slayer? FactCheck? Or perhaps Snopes? They have the means. They are, after all, funded by George Soros slash the “Deep State”, depending on what silly conspiracy theory you opt for.
Of course, the reality is that the email isn’t the real deal. We can breathe a sigh of relief, since no one wants us dead. It’s actually a variation of the increasingly popular and extremely audacious “hitman scam” that we’ve previously discussed in a blog post here.
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The scam is as rudimental as it is hopeful, and will use the following template –
– The scammer, posing as an assassin, emails the recipient telling the recipient that somebody has placed a “hit” on them.
– The scammer tells the recipient that they can avoid being killed if they pay a fine, in which case the scammer will not carry out the assassination.
– The scammer warns the recipient to not tell anyone about the email.
– If the recipient refuses, the scammer tells them they’ll be dead in a few days’ time.
– The scammer will instruct the recipient to pay the money through an anonymous method like Bitcoin.
While we imagine that most of us would be able to disregard the email scam pretty quickly, maybe even have a laugh at its audaciousness, the scam does enjoy some success. In 2007, 11 years from the time the above email landed in our inbox, the authorities were investigating where the emails were coming from.
The fact that 11 years later they are still being circulated means one thing; some people out there are falling for them.
So please help educate the people in your life that may be vulnerable to such a scam. Elderly people, people with disabilities or the technophobic and scam-clumsy. While the email is amusing to most of us, to some people out there, it could be the scariest and most upsetting thing they’ll ever encounter.