Ban T-shirts Blog

I thought I’d share this email I got today because it is typical of the kind of emails I get from scammers. I don’t know exactly how their scams work – but I suspect that either they are variations on the well-known “we need a bank account where we can deposit $100,000,000, you can keep 10%” which usually emanates from somewhere like Nigeria and which results in the victim’s bank account being emptied of its contents, or they will do a chargeback on the credit card after you have shipped them their order for thousands of shirts. Who knows. Anyway – this is the email:

My name is larry john i am with the Presbyterian Church of God (if he’s “with” God then he must be trustworthy, right?) and i will like to order a T SHIRT,below is the specification of my inquiry (poor grammar and spelling is another big scammer giveaway):Models

Gildan heavy cotton
Sizes;Mediumsize and 2xl
Colors white only (the chump want to order 3000 shirts – but only medium and 2XL? Ha! ha!)

if you have any sizes (ooh, I wonder, would I have any mediums and 2XLs? Nah we only do smalls and larges, you need to try the mediums and 2XLs stores, matey) of this you can email me back with a total cost of that or you can email me back with any one that you have . (So now sizes are irrelevant! F**k it – who cares if it fits or not!)

Quantity:1,500 pics of the Mediumsize and 1,500 pics of the 2xland add me the total cost as one . (Shit, you want me to add up? That’s gonna cost you extra!)

kindly email me with a total pickup price of 1,500 pics (so now it’s just the 1,500? Not 3,000?)…..I will like you to
send me an email response with the picked up price for this sizes (Oh man – now you want to pick up the order? Won’t that involve a lot of travelling on your part? Or maybe you want to beat me to death and steal everything I own too?) and if you don’t have this size or type available kindly email me with the sizes you have available (er, yeah, you mentioned that already). I will like to know your forms or terms of payment you accept Kindly respond to me as soon as possible for us to proceed further with the order and your phone number.
thank you
larry john

The other big giveaway is that I am blind copied on the email (he put an email address at yque.com in the To: field). So there is no mention of my name, my website or anything that could distinguish it from a form email. This is not even a particularly bad example of this type of email. I’ve seen worse examples and examples where the scammer has made more of an effort to appear authentic. I sometimes get several of these each day so I have got fairly skilled at identifying them.

Other giveaways are that they almost always want to place huge orders and that they like USING UPPERCASE!! (The title of this email was “TO ORDER______” – with inexplicable multiple underscores). Also they usually indicate that they want to pay by credit card – that wasn’t mentioned in this email but I am sure Larry would have mentioned it pretty quickly if I had replied to him.

I’d be interested to know if anyone knows how the scam actually works.

Just for a minute let’s forget about the reams of data, the statistics, whether it’s wetter, drier, hotter or colder than usual. Let’s use our heads! Billions of tons of trees and plant matter containing carbon dioxide have been compressed over millions of years and have formed coal, oil and gas. All that CO2 is being released in one huge blast over a what is a comparatively extremely short period of time. And the intensity of that blast has increased over the last few years as countries like China and India catch up with Europe and North America. Countless vehicles, power stations and planes belch CO2 into the atmosphere. The atmosphere is just a few miles thick. Immense amounts of forested area have been cut down.

How could this not affect the planet?! The problem I have with global warming skeptics is their complete and utter lack of imagination and common sense – combined with a dogmatic pig-headed determination to pounce on any tiny piece of news that might indicate that is still not a “scientific consensus”. Use your heads for Christ’s sake! Think about it! All that CO2 that was built up over millions of years – released in a few decades…. and you’re saying…. “nothing”?