Entries this day: Lin_spam Progress Yokohama_to_see_Lin zzzzz_awesome

Lin spam

6:49pm JST Wednesday 8 December 2010 (day 14868)

Lin got an email she thought was a bit strange, and asked me to interpret it for her; she thought maybe because the guy wasn't a native English speaker that she couldn't understand it properly.

Turns out, the message was fake; it was equivalent to the messages assuring me that I've won $4.5,000,00.000 billion Pounds in the Quality Assurance Sweepstakes of London, England, Ltd. But in this case, they were specifically targeting her industry.

The first email looked fine "we'd like to buy your product," etc.

So she replied and they were like, "send your address to our bank at $big_bank@hotmail.com"

and she did, and they were like, "not your email address, your mailing address; we have a big cheque for you."

And she called me instead, going "wtf?"

I looked at the first email while listening to her, and my alarms started ringing when she said they asked her for her bank info. Then I looked at the email she sent to the bank and I saw hotmail.com. Aha. I was like, "um, what is the bank's email address?"

She diligently read it back to me, including the hotmail.com, but didn't notice the problem.

"Okay, and what is your email address?"

She told me, including her company's domain name. She still didn't notice, but I knew she was tired after long days at work. No need to waste her time more than these guys already had.

"Why does a big bank have a hotmail.com address, but your company has its own domain for its email addresses?"

"Oh My God," etc etc.

I told her to tell her boss so the company can be made aware that this type of thing.

Here's the emails they sent, in case it helps anyone not get scammed:

From: Babcock Guarantee Security Finance Ltd [mailto:babcock_gsf_ltd@hotmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, December 08, 2010 3:16 PM
Subject: From Babcock Guarantee Finance Ltd.

Good Day 

From Babcock Guarantee Finance Ltd. Concerning the loan which your partner has applied, we want to
inform you that the loan have been approved by our finance company and all the documents has been
signed.

However, reconfirmed your personal information to enable us send to you the traveler’s cheque. The
information that we needed from you are your full name 2.your postal address 3.your phone number
4. Your bank name. 

Once you provide us with the above information's we are going to send the travelers cheque across to
you, based on these I will be looking forward to your responds.

Regards,

Babcock Guarantee Finance Ltd.

Mr. Tony.

Ignoring other misspellings, notice "your partner" is incorrect. If anything, it should be "your client."

Progress

8:46pm JST Wednesday 8 December 2010 (day 14868)

I got a droppable area on a page, and nearly got its color to change when a file hovers over it. For a moment, I had the .php file reacting when the image was dropped, but now I'm getting a JSON error that the PHP file doesn't exist. It exists. Not sure what changed to make this error come up. ARgh.

Yokohama to see Lin

8:47pm JST Wednesday 8 December 2010 (day 14868)

Headed to Yokohama to see Lin. Yay!!

zzzzz awesome

3:42am JST Thursday 9 December 2010 (day 14869)

Sweet. I've gotten some code working that allows me to drop images onto an area of my web browser and then those images appear on the same browser window on which they were dropped.

The code is basically proof of concept alpha quality (where alpha is lower quality than beta), so tomorrow I'll sketch out more carefully what needs to happen, and then beef up the code some. I'm reallly happy about this. I *might* actually use this to populate images on fly2.nu sites. Maybe. And maybe a quick way to embed pictures in my journal. Gotta figure out a robust file naming method. YYYY/MM/DD/original_filename will almost certainly be okay for my journal. Probably can even do away with the DD/

For Soness's project, I'll probably randomize the file names.