Subject: ASSISTANCE NEEDED (fwd)

From: "Fred N. van Kempen" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu Jun 19 17:17:25 2003

This email address is ONLY used for cctalk.  SO, someone is
getting addresses from this list.

Jay?

--fred

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 07:29:42 -0700
From: BASHER  MOBUTU <[email-masked]>
Reply-To: [email-masked]
To: [email-masked]
Subject: ASSISTANCE NEEDED

Good Day,

You may be surprise to receive this email since you do not know me.
I am the son of the late president of Democratic Republic Of Zaire, President Mobutu Sese Seko, ( now The Republic of Congo, under the leadership of the son of Mr. Laurent Kabila).  I presume you are aware there is a financial dispute between my family ( THEMOBUTUS ) and the present civilian Government. This is based on what they believe as bad and corrupt governance on my late father's part. May his soul rest in perfect peace. As you might have heard how a lot of my father's bank account in Switzerland and North America have been frozen. Following the above named reasons, I am soliciting for your humble and confidential assistance to take custody of THIRTY Million United States Dollars ( US$30,000,000.00 ), also to front for me in the areas of business you desire profitable.

<blah deleted, the usual crap>

---

From: John Lawson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu Jun 19 17:18:20 2003

> getting addresses from this list.

  And this surprises you... why?   It's a semi-public list, linked in many
places, and has been for a long time.  Spam is 40% of all Internet traffic
(by moderate estimates) and they are quite diabolical at harvesting
addresses. Any addresses. All addresses.

  Maybe we could barter with the Nigerians - they transfer the money to a
consortium of Compter Collectors and allied Museum curators, and we would
ship them 10,000 386 systems complete and (possibly) functioning, for the
betterment of Nigerian education...

  Of course, they'd have to pay for the shipping and customs!

    Cheers

John Mbange Sosumi III, Esq.

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From: "Jay West" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu Jun 19 17:19:26 2003

It is possible that a spammer has joined the list, and is harvesting
addresses by storing the email address of each post. However, that's not
real common for spammers to do that. This is too low volume (comparatively)
of a list for them to benefit much from that when they can get millions of
email addresses much more easily and quickly (newsgroups, buying lists,
etc.).

I'm sorry to say, and I know you don't want to hear this... but 99 times out
of 100 when someone thinks that someone is harvesting email addresses from
the list, that's not the case. They either posted somewhere else, or were
victims of an address harvesting program on a website that talks to Outlook,
that kinda thing.

More to the point, I don't think there is anything that can be done to
prevent this. We have exceedingly strong spam prevention as to this list - I
know when I go through all the postings manually several times a day!

Jay West

---

From: "Mike" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu Jun 19 17:20:18 2003

It is simply amazing how "ignorant" some people are to believe that any of
this SPAM SCAMs are legit.   You'd have to be nearly brain-dead to believe
the Nigerian SCAMs are legit.