email scam

Just got the following:


Dear Friend,
Good day and compliments, i know this letter will definitely come to you as a huge surprise,I am Capt. Brian Morgan, a US Marine, serving in the 3rd Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment which Patrols the Anbar province, Iraq.
I am desperately in need of assistance and I have summoned up courage to contact you. I am presently in Iraq and I found your contact particulars in an address journal. I am seeking your assistance to evacuate the sum of $2,500,000:00 (Two million Five Hundred Thousand United States Dollars) to the States or any safe country, as far as I can be assured that it will be safe in your care until I complete my service here.This is no stolen money and there are no dangers involved. You do not have any financial Obligations as regards this Deal.
Kindly Contact me via my private Email: captbrianmorgan@live.com so that I can furnish you with more details.
Respectfully,
Capt. Brian Morgan
United States Marine Corps. IRAQ


It went to my junkmail but since it was from "Captain Morgan" I thought that was funny and wanted to see what it was. The email address that it came from is 'something' at planttel.net so I looked up planttel and see that it's a small ISP in Georgia. We've all seen these things before, usually someone in Nigeria wanting your 'help' to move this money, blah blah blah. I typically ignore and delete. For some reason I was thinking of actually forwarding this one to the ISP and seeing if they can ferret out this loser playing this scam. Would they be able to do that? Am I wasting my time? Should I just delete it and move on?

 

Yargh!

 

Gee, thanks Kaos. That was helpful.

 

i'd report it juwt to get the company in trouble if possible, but it's ridiculous- where the he<< would a marine get $2.5M?!?!? and shame on anyone using or soldiers and iraq for a scam.

 

'the company'? Meaning I should send it to the ISP?

 

that's over MY head... some tekkie will anser you soon I am SURE!

 

yes - make sure you include the header of the email - this will help the ISP to figure out where the email originated and they can report or blacklist address from their email server. Hope that helps.

 

"Helpful" is NOT in my job description.

Go here: http://www.spamcop.net/ set up an account (it's free).

What e-mail client do you use? The reason I ask is you need to be able to forward the e-mail to spamcop, in plain text, with full headers. I can try and walk you through all of that.

 

Mr. Linux... that was my fear. That even if I did report it, nobody would care or even try to prosecute this animal.

 

Well, I take exception to the bleakness. The idea in reporting spam (IMHO) is not to catch the spammer (we never will) butg make the ISPs adopt better security measures and NOT allow their mail servers to be open relays. If we can keep uo the reporting pressure and lock down the servers used by the spammers, we can start to make a dent.

 

Outlook.

(Is that an email client? Is that what you mean?)

 

I received the same email and I use Yahoo. I just delete these things.