Ordinary Gweilo

I get rather irritated with Internet chain letters.  Fortunately I don’t receive many, but when I do I check them against lists of known hoaxes.  Most are stupid or misguided, but some do have an element of truth.  Normally they usually include a warning of some kind, and presumably some people take notice of them and avoid using certain shampoos or putting water in a microwave.

What I find puzzling is that as this rubbish passes around the world, it often get altered along the way, so people are obviously spending their time updating them before sending them to 50 friends.  Here’s one I received recently.

The full text of the email is here

To you all – this is a genuine one that I have been sent via Surrey Police.  I should know – I work for them

 —–
See at the bottom of this email for the latest

Surrey Police

Subject:        VISA & MASTERCARD SCAM

I have been told about the below and had it passed onto me.  Please send this out to as many people as you can…

Please see e-mail below re latest VISA & MASTERCARD scam. Please pass on to all your teams and mailing lists. I got this from a contact in the Halifax Visa team so it is happening!!

[includes the text from the US original, but with US references changed to British ones, so 1-800 becomes 800, Arizona becomes Anywhere, and dollars become pounds, but otherwise it’s identical]

Heptonstalls
Solicitors
9-11 Ropergate End
Tel 01977 602804
Fax 01977 602805

Internet communications are not secure and therefore Surrey Police does not accept legal responsibility for the contents of this message.  This email and any attachments may be confidential. They may contain privileged information and are intended for the named addressee (s) only. They must not be distributed without our consent. If you are not the intended recipient, please notify us immediately and delete the message and any attachments from your computer, do not disclose, distribute, or retain this email or any part of it. Unless expressly stated, opinions in this email are those of the individual sender, and not of Surrey Police. We believe but do not warrant that this e-mail and any attachments are virus free. You must therefore take full responsibility for virus checking. Surrey Police reserves the right to monitor all email communications through their networks.

Lv Leila

Leila Jones

What I love about these things is that always have references to reputable organizations (or IBM, if it’s computer related). Here we have Halifax (a British bank that issues credit cards), a firm of solicitors in Pontefract, and the Surrey Police. I doubt that people at any of these organizations actually sent out this email – their names were just added to make it seem more authentic. It also tells you to send it to as many people as possible.

It is obviously very unlikely that the same scam is being carried it out in the UK by people using the same names and the exact same currency amounts. So what we have here is someone taking an email that is circulating in the States and adapting it for the British Internet Chain Letter market. Even if the original was true, the copy clearly isn’t.

In fact, I doubt that the original was a true story (though something similar may well have happened). For example, the concept of an authorization limit for credit card transactions (and hence the value of slightly less than $500) surely goes back to the days when retailers had to phone up and speak to someone to get authorization. For many years, it has been done electronically, and this has two big advantages – firstly that all transactions get authorized, and secondly that unusual patterns can be detected. If a card is suddenly used extensively in a location where the cardholder doesn’t normally use the card, or if a large number of on-line or phone transactions are made (especially by one vendor), it is easy for the card issuer to start making checks. I have been phoned by my bank after making relatively small transactions on the Internet, so I know they do it.

Anyway, what could be more suspicious to a credit card company than several transactions for the same amount of money for a single customer in a short space of time?

At least with advertising spam you probably don’t even have to open it to realize what it is, whereas this stuff usually comes from someone you know, and it does appear plausible, so people probably read it. As such I reckon it’s more of a waste of time than the type of unsolicited spam we are always reading about.