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?

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