A Yahoo Spammer Exposed

For some reason, spam originating from yahoo.UK keeps coming to me in a very curious manner. The spammers claim that they have a large sum of money waiting for me and that they need to confirm my identity. Other twists on the approach is that they have come into a large sum of money and they need my help investing it here in the United States. An even more interesting approach has been when I posted my boat up for sale on EBAY and was actually sent a certified bank check, which upon further due diligence, turned out to be fake. Crooks are really stupid if they think people are not going to call the issuing bank to verify available funds and the legitimacy of the check. When bad checks are issued, this constitutes a felony and you can get The United States Secret Service involved, as this is one of their areas of specialization.

In respect to the spammers who appear to originate from the UK, they can not overcome the fact that computer email messages can be traced by header information as well as suopenas to the ISP. Some providers, such as YAHOO have become so sick of having to deal with these problems, that they have established internal departments to handle the demand. If you have been contacted by a spammer who you feel is trying to scam you out of cash, yahoo does have some recourse for you.

In my situation, since the message came from the yahoo.uk system, I submitted proof of the message, the subject line, email address, message header, and message content to:
http://help.yahoo.com/fast/help/uk/mail/cgi_spam

This is how the email came to me:

ATTENTION:MR RUSSELL NOMER

I AM IN RECEIPT OF YOUR EMAIL MESSAGE.THE CONTENTS OF THE FORWARDED MESSAGE OF YOURS BY MR.GILBERT CHARLES ENTAILS YOUR COMPENSATION DRAFT CHEQUE OF USD$100,000.00 PRESENTED TO ME ON YOUR BEHALF BY YOUR BENEFACTOR MR.GILBERT CHARLES.
I WAS INSTRUCTED BY MR.CHARLES TO FORWARD YOUR FUNDS TO YOU IMMEDIATELY AFTER YOU'VE CONTACTED ME OFFICIALLY AND WITH PROPER SELF IDENTIFICATION.I WILL GET BACK TO YOU AFTER MY PROPER VERIFICATIONS TO ASCERTAIN THE LEGITIMACY OF YOU BEING THE NEW BENEFICIARY OF THE FUNDS WORTH USD$100,000 UNITED STATES DOLLARS DEPOSITED WITHIN MY CARE BY MR.GILBERT CHARLES.

RESPECTIVELY,

BARRISTER.CORRY MARBLE (HONS,SAB,ORDER OF BENIN REPUBLIC,SENIOR ADVOCATE)

This is the message header: (Note the IP, date and time stamps)

Return-Path:
Delivered-To: russelln-russell@russellnomer.com
Received: (qmail 34398 invoked from network); 13 Mar 2007 11:50:17 -0000
Received: from unknown (HELO web27305.mail.ukl.yahoo.com) (217.146.177.166)
by host211.ipowerweb.com with SMTP; 13 Mar 2007 11:50:17 -0000
Received: (qmail 50149 invoked by uid 60001); 13 Mar 2007 11:50:16 -0000
DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws;
s=s1024; d=yahoo.co.uk;
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Message-ID: <20070313115016.50147.qmail@web27305.mail.ukl.yahoo.com>
X-YMail-OSG: jwqXNFIVM1l3_LASyZUXWGG6rfTFxCu4fmsaOzVZCp3qH82o3OOO2d3zWWwDOrJSpHpnC8Nmst_ArRCPNDyM_ZKNmYnHBHimsPvP5wb7niE9IvGjMRI-
Received: from [86.62.11.98] by web27305.mail.ukl.yahoo.com via HTTP; Tue, 13 Mar 2007 11:50:16 GMT
Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2007 11:50:16 +0000 (GMT)
From: marble corry
Subject: Re: FW: Remuneration
To: russell@russellnomer.com
In-Reply-To: <000001c764e4$65e50f20$31af2d60$@com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="0-450757521-1173786616=:48398"
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