It’s all about where you draw the line

I’m confused. I got this email today, and though I know that it must be some sort of scam, I can’t for the life of me imagine what the sender could do if I responded. The email:

Good day,

My name is Mr. John Marthins with <real-sounding organization>, and I am interested in potentially ordering medical parts from your store. I’d like to know the availability and cost of the specifications below:

• 30 Lithman Classic II Stethoscopes
• 30 Digital Blood Pressure Monitors (Any brand available for small cuffs)

Upon the receipt of your costs and availability, I can supply you with my Visa account number or other payment method to prepay funds for the order and shipping via US Global Express Mail Service (3 to 5 days shipping) to:

<real-sounding organization>
<real-looking address>
Nigeria , 23401

I look forward to hearing from you,

John Marthins
(<real-looking email address>@yahoo.com)

This can’t possibly be worth it just to confirm legitimate email addresses, can it? How could you use this to scam someone out of money? At best they’ll get a bunch of “Sorry, you wrote to the wrong address” emails in return.

I don’t get it.

Note: although the yahoo address in the email seems reasonably legitimate, I am quite sure this is a spam-scam of some sort — the actual address from which the email came is too fishy for words.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 29th, 2005 at 4:54 pm and is filed under Geekery & Nerdaphernalia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.