Hello.

Well, I've got this letter today:
Well, although I nearly replied (curiosity, mostly), it is clearly a spam (nearly identical letters on the internet, different "From" and "Reply-To" fields in headers and reply-to address on yahoo.com domain, etc, and because of common sense).
I don't get one thing. What is the point of this? I.e. by replying to the email I'm supposed to lose money or something else. But how? Something like "I'm poor girl, send me $1000 for a ticket to meet you" or what? Or there is any other possibility to get "hurt" from replying?

My brother got one of those and he played around replying back and forth for a while. Mostly just because he was bored and wanted to waste the scammer's time. The catch on his was something like she wanted a plane ticket to come meet him, or her relative needed surgery and she didn't have the money, or she was in with a shady guy... Blah blah blah.

It really is amazing how many people fall for these types of scams.

Well, with this particular spam it's not surprising. It took me 30 seconds to realize that I do not have "profile" mentioned in letter, that this profile isn't mentioned in letter, and that chances of real girl contacting complete stranger like this (AND accidentally picking my email address) are very very small. Besides, it is less common than "Lottery win"(some idiots are even trying to use automatically-translated (!) english text), and it isn't banking scam that people are perfectly aware of, and they aren't offering you to enlarge something.
I heard about several "russian brides" scams before (love letters -> money for tickets -> disapperance. Some scammers even got caught.), but I wasn't expecting to get such letter on my email box in .ru zone (guess their software is bugged or they just try all addresses without filtering). So I thought maybe there is something else besides "ticket money" that I should be aware of...

Heck I'd answer it just for the fun of screwing with them.

There are a lot of idiots out there.

Don't ever reply to a spammer. Even if they're scammers and you want to screw with them in you're replies, you've just given them validation that you're email is real and they'll make money by selling it off to the next spammer or scammer.

Amen to what trickykid says! A valid email address is worth more money to a spammer. Your reward for replying: more spam.

And here's why you get so many of the bloody thingsyes, that's million

Great way to be spammed out. Imagine you're up against some pimply kid who hates the world and has nothing better to do - and he now knows your email address. Spammers don't necessarily know your email address when spam is delivered to you.

[edit] Even if spammers knew your email, they wouldn't be offended by people who never responded. Why write back and say "hey, here's a target for you!"

I wouldn't do that, because this is my mostly used mail address, and I'm receiving enough spam already, even with "spam protection" of provider of that box.

Theoretically, it could be fun to make bank spammers contact love-letter scammer and talk to each other. Or to do something similar. In reality, doing this might be a problem.

Well I guess I am too priviledged (dunno why though).Hardly got any spam at all over the last 4 years - maybe 20 in that period.

There is a webpage of a guy who even got money out of one of those nigerians (not much tough - think it was 100,-- bucks or so) by manipulating them.

Probably cleaned up by your ISP - I see heaps more on my yahoo account than an account on a "real" ISP. Yahoo dump suspect mail into a spam folder, but they're not as good at detecting spam as my normal ISP.

Nah - it's over a webmail account on a hosted server w/o spam filtering enabled.
I'd guess it takes them a couple of years to put new domains on the list and if there are only a couple of email accounts on the domain they don't even bother.

I'm betting it's more of a scammer than a spammer, and in neither case a beautiful girl. Probably just some fat hairy jackass in Nigeria who wants to scam. Maybe not Nigeria, but as many know, that is the scam capital of the earth.

She's back ... ahhhh

http://i67.photobucket.com/albums/h3...se/14_f_ca.jpg

Yeah, that's definitely Lilian.