Last month, during a routine e-mail check, I saw I had a message from a “Captain James T. Kirk.” Now, being a bit of a geek, I immediately thought of Star Trek, which is the main reason I didn’t delete it immediately, to share with my husband. We had a good laugh over my e-mail from the 23rd century. I suppose a real life person could have the same name, but you’d think he would have been teased too much about his fictional counterpart to want to use his full name plus middle initial in this way.
Of course, the real message of the e-mail had nothing to do with Star Trek. It turned out to be a standard spam/scam e-mail, along the lines of the old “Nigerian” prince scams, but it tried to give itself a kind of validity by claiming to be from a US Army captain in Afghanistan, who wished to send me $10,500,000. All he needed were my bank account details and personal phone number 😯 Now, being an Army wife, I do know a lot of servicemen who have served there, so many of the details of the sender’s “service” sounded particularly bogus. For one thing, the “captain” claimed he was using his “official” e-mail: a G-mail account. Soldiers have Army e-mail accounts that have nothing to do with Google.
Adding a final note of absurdity of the whole thing was the closing line, asking me not to respond to the official e-mail address, but to his “private” e-mail, instead — which just happened to be completely identical to his so-called official one.
Sounds to me like this particular spammer is just a little bit confused… 😉
These are usually so funny to receive. But there must be some people who will, sadly, fall for the lure of easy money. Gmail as official military email is one I haven’t heard before. I guess they decided to drop the official military version? 😛
Sadly, those who will fall for it will be the ones who can least afford to do so. =(
I can’t imagine anyone falling for these scams, but they must, or scammers wouldn’t keep sending them out. Watch out. Pretty soon you’ll be hearing from Spock and Scotty. 🙂
LOL. Hope not, but we’ll have to wait and see what happens 😉
Sorry . . . It was me. But you can still send the $10,000,000 this way.
Haha! 🙂