Ishmael

This story starts yesterday, when I listed one of my old domains on Sedo. I went and set up the account and listed the domain and pointed it to a parking page since it’s just sitting there anyway.

So today, I log into my email and see that I have a message – The subject line reads like this:

vaksman – subject: ****.com (sent 11/25/2008)

At this point, I’m thinking “look, another spam message. Oh joy! Oh well, let’s give it a shot,” and I opened it. Then I read the message:

—————
from: vaksman@eliteinvestment.net
to: ****@msn.com
date: Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 7:45 AM
subject: ****.com (sent 11/25/2008)
mailed-by: msn.com
—————
Hello,

Your domain name has been found online. Please let us know your price.

We are in real estate business. Domain name industry is a new direction
for us. Sometimes we buy, sometimes we resell for making a profit.

Looking forward to do business with you.

Regards,
Gene Vaksman
Vice President
Elite Network

First off, I haven’t used MSN in forever. It’s one of my for seriously *old* email addresses. And secondly, how can you not find a message like this humorous?

But then! Just for kicks, I typed in eliteinvestment.net and to my surprise (yeah, right), there was only one page of content. There were links, but they either went to the same page, a copy of the same page, or the contact page. The contact page had a incomplete address for somewhere in the UK. It kinda sorta could’ve looked legit. Yeah, ok. Maybe not.

I did some google work and found out that this is a pretty well known scam. There was this one post I found that was posted back in July. Which makes it even funnier.

It’s also kinda sad though. Obviously people are falling for this scam because if they weren’t, they wouldn’t keep running it.