What's the scam? (was: what´s the prize?)
On Wednesday, Oct 15, 2003, at 17:02 US/Eastern, david albarran wrote:
hi! i want to know what this is about. and if i won a prize tell me as
soon as you can i¥m the 50,000,000 th user, so show me the money.
OK, we get a fair number of these. So do some other people. None of the
claimants ever seem to respond when asked about the details. From
googling, here are some other references:
http://www.stdavids.co.uk/forums/message_board/posts/1250.html
Some other discussion about it, where it was apparently an ad on the
website. But we don't have ads on debian.org, so can't be this:
http://www.sitepointforums.com/archive/index/t-125260
Note sure what this is, didn't bother to read it --- I just google ;-)
OK, actually, I did read it, and it appears to be a helldesk person
complaining about a luser. Search for "50,000,000"
http://www.techcomedy.com/users/submitted_content.php?nick=bluesclues
This may be related, but not quite the same. Search for 50,000,000 on
the page:
http://bugs.guug.de/db/78/787-b.html
Interestingly, none of this seems to be posted to, e.g., NANAE.
Personally, I sort of suspect address collection or other scam. I
suspect this because of all the messages we've gotten, and all I can
find on the web, the are quite similar in ways you would not expect,
such as putting the commas in "50,000,000". No one wrote "50000000" or
"50.000.000". I'd expect that if these were messages generated by
confused lusers, we'd see more variation in them.
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