A Full Diary of a Cyber Crime .. From Phishing to Profit

I’m going to show a full timeline of a Cyber Crime to show the steps that a scammer will take in order to gain funds from their target. Overall I’m interested in seeing how a scamming crime evolves to the point of profit for the scammer. The first sign of the crime appeared when I received:

and I had to go ahead and reply:

And so began a scam with the reply:

So I followed up and contacted them:

Next I received back the details of the form:

The first document was an application form:

and the second was an affidavit of the claim:

And so, if you excuse the typo in “Enginner”, it related to my next of kin: Clifford Fanos Buchanan. At that point, I had to smile, especially has he had such great name.

And so I delayed while I worked out how best to mark-up the form, but was still prompted:

and again:

So I called and asked for advice:

You will notice BCTI is a real bank, but BCTIGL.COM does not exist. I called the “real bank”, but they didn’t speak English.

So I “signed” the form and send it back:

As you can see, the letter relates to my next of kin, who died in a plane crash in 2007 (along with his wife and daughter), and I signed it is as “Bill Bucfake”:

This was then acknowledged:

Next “the bank” emailed me a questionaire:

and which had a rather horrible form:

I then delayed a bit as I had to find a way to mark-up the form and get some ID:

and:

And so I engaged again:

And so off my form went:

He then told me what to add:

and then I marked up the form:

and added my ID (sorry so to “Bill Buchanan” from “24”):

And the “bank” accepted it:

I could finally see what the scam was “They wanted $950 for me to process the fee”:

and so it continues with …

But in the end the scammer I’ve been communicating with, didn’t like my ID:

End of story!