Tsunami Scammer Spammer Arrested

from the somewhat-honest,-though dept

A man who sent out spam requesting tsunami relief donations was arrested, and admitted that he planned to keep the money. It's almost amusing to read the description: "he planned to use any money he got to repair his car and pay bills, according to court documents." Written this way, it sounds like he just came right out and admitted his plan -- making him a fairly honest scammer. You would think that most scammers caught in such a situation would immediately say they were going to donate the money, but hadn't yet. The other odd thing about the article is the claim that they found the guy by "figuring out who copied the same images from the [charity he was pretending to be] group's Web site." How did they figure out who copied the images? My only guess is that he then was hosting these images himself, but otherwise, I don't see how they could know who copied the images.
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  1. identicon
    dorpus, 14 Jan 2005 @ 5:01pm

    Ethernet Signature

    With word files, there are ethernet signatures hidden in the file that identify the computer it originated from. Could not images have the same data hidden? We know that there is a whole art form of hiding data within image files.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. identicon
    etherdust, 15 Jan 2005 @ 5:45am

    Copying Images

    He probably didn't "copy" the images at all. The scammer was likely dumb enough to link the images directly from the legitimate charity site. Then it's just a simple matter of looking at Web referrer logs to see who is referecing the images directly instead of pointing people to the originating site.

    link to this | view in thread ]


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