Dot Con
Page 14
Publishing Director: Sarah Lavelle
Creative Director: Helen Lewis
Senior Editor: Céline Hughes
Designer: Nicola Ellis
Production: Emily Noto and Vincent Smith
First published in 2015 by Quadrille Publishing
Quadrille is an imprint of Hardie Grant www.hardiegrant.com.au
Quadrille Publishing
Pentagon House
52–54 Southwark Street
London SE1 1UN
www.quadrille.co.uk
Text © 2015 James Veitch
Design and layout © 2015 Quadrille Publishing
Picture credits
Inside back cover photograph © Patrick Cadell
Pages 14, 35, 51 inset, 52 inset, 53 inset, 58, 61, 111, 121 artwork by James Veitch; pages 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 114 images emailed to James Veitch; page 113 © Steve McCabe; page 114 inset © David Turnley/Corbis
All exchanges set out in the book are genuine correspondence. The names of the scammers have been altered and any resemblance to real persons or companies is unintended and purely coincidental. Some of the exchanges have also been edited and/or abridged. Where the scammers have posed as well known individuals or as employees or customers of real companies, the names have not been altered. This is for the purpose of exposing the methods by which the scammers operate. The publisher apologises for any offence caused to real persons or companies wrongly implicated in the scams.
The rights of the author have been asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this book shall be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise – without written permission from the publisher.
Cataloguing in Publication Data: a catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-84949-735-0
*Elena is dangling in front of me everything she thinks I want. Which makes me wonder whether I can return the favour. Who does Elena want? What’s her ideal mark?
*Godwin has sent me a phoney PayPal payment. The PayPal email looks legit until you look at the domain it’s been sent from (top left) – @mail2online.com, which is definitely not PayPal.com. Godwin is betting on me not checking my PayPal account before I ship the phone. Which explains the urgency…
*In 1996, someone wrote a tiny piece of software to generate (and then email) random, meaningless sentences. It’s been running ever since.
*These guys are masquerading as the Royal Bank of Scotland. What I love is that their email address is info@royalBS