The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Saturday, June 18, 2022

I think this is a scam email, but I'm not sure how it works

I received the following email last night:

From
Sergio Rios <XXXXX­XXXXX­XXXXX­XXXXX­X>
To
Undisclosed recipients:;
Subject
transfer done
Date
Fri, 17 Jun 2022 22:43:09 +0000

Hi Carlo,

Trust you are having a good day. As earlier discussed in our last week meeting, your bitcoin wallet has been funded with 48 .99 BTC making a total of 1,433,296.04 USD. Please login with below details to confirm your BTC balance.

Website : XXXXX­XXXXX­XXXXX­X
Customer ID : XXXXX­XXX
password: XXXXX­XXXX

I’ll be joining the team coming week for a symposium in Switzerland. Give me a call if anything else is needed.

Regards,
Sergio

I don't understand this email. It was sent to an email address I have that is the target of a lot of spam (it's the address I use for my domain registration and as I never opted to “hide” that email address, it's gotten around to a lot of spam lists), although the “undisclosed recipients” kind of gives it away as spam anyway. The website exists (I checked DNS) but I have not visited the site, so I don't know of the customer ID or password actually work. A quick web search on the domain name has revealed a lot of suspicion about the website, and a search on “Sergio Rios” doesn't reveal anything either.

So I have to wonder—what's the angle here? What's the scam? How is this supposed to work?

Obligatory Picture

[The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades]

Obligatory Contact Info

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Obligatory Links

Obligatory Miscellaneous

You have my permission to link freely to any entry here. Go ahead, I won't bite. I promise.

The dates are the permanent links to that day's entries (or entry, if there is only one entry). The titles are the permanent links to that entry only. The format for the links are simple: Start with the base link for this site: https://boston.conman.org/, then add the date you are interested in, say 2000/08/01, so that would make the final URL:

https://boston.conman.org/2000/08/01

You can also specify the entire month by leaving off the day portion. You can even select an arbitrary portion of time.

You may also note subtle shading of the links and that's intentional: the “closer” the link is (relative to the page) the “brighter” it appears. It's an experiment in using color shading to denote the distance a link is from here. If you don't notice it, don't worry; it's not all that important.

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