So, the other day, I got a Facebook message from a friend who I hadn’t heard from on Facebook before. My mom also called and told me that she had received a similar message and that she was fairly sure this friend’s account had been hacked and that it was a scammer.

So, I thought I’d have a little fun (names have been changed to protect the innocent):

This friend (to the best of my knowledge), does not know a Wendy, but I figured I’d see what he said. No response about Wendy, but a promise of $200! Whoop!

In the meantime, I thought I’d decide to find out where our scammer friend was actually from. So I used a website called requestb.in to create a link that I could send the scammer that would let me see his IP address. I’d send the link to him under the premise that I had a “project” that I wanted him to check out for me.

I opened up a virtual machine, and tried going to the scammer’s link so I could see what the he was trying to get me to do. It didn’t end up working–I think it was trying to send me to a separate Facebook Messenger chat or something. (If not already quite obvious, please do not try to go to that lindajones3456 link)

At the same time, I watched my RequestBin to see if Jeff clicked on my link. He did:

In the upper right hand corner, you can see that their IP address was 41.220.68.236. The handy-dandy geoiptool.com shows us where that IP is located:

Well whaddyaknow!! Our Jeff friend is from Nigeria! (Wonder if he’s a prince…)

Meanwhile, I let Jeff know that his link wasn’t working – so he had his friend reach out to me directly:

And lo and behold, “Linda Jones” sends me a message request!

All of a sudden, she got really excited:

Once she got to the logistics she calmed down a bit. Good thing, too, cause my ears were hurting from all that yelling.

I’m starting to think that Linda might only want me for my banking security questions. Feeling sad about that, I decided to see if maybe Linda could just Venmo or PayPal me the $200 instead.

Cool! So I guess I’ll be getting $200 through PayPal? Sweet. Meanwhile, Jeff was messaging me, and I discovered that we had a misunderstanding:

“ok try to understand me”

$200,000!!! Now I realize what he meant by $200.000 in the first message. Being from Nigeria, that decimal is the thousands separator. How silly of me to have thought otherwise.

At the same time, I discovered another stunning revelation from Linda, who was still not keen on us using PayPal:

“5 ups men”

I apparently am going to have company. I’d better tidy up the living room…

I had no intention of actually giving Linda my information, and it wouldn’t be as fun if I just gave her bogus information, so I decided to try to get an email address from her:

Not sure how I feel about lucylopez85 – but I figured, I’ll shoot her an email. So, I use a burner email address I’ve got and send her an email. I quickly send her this message at the same time on Facebook:

This was my email to her, along with her response:

“You fill out a wrong information”

I mean, she’s not wrong.

I then get this from her on Facebook:

I decided to send her a link to the same RequestBin that I had used before, just to see if these “two” were coming from the same IP address:

And I quickly got another hit on the RequestBin from the same IP address:

I’m starting to think that Linda might not be who she claims to be.

Meanwhile, Jeff didn’t have too much to say:

And Linda tried one more time to get me to “fill out the form” she so desperately wanted me to complete. I responded to her question – with a question:

From there on out, I didn’t hear much from Linda. I started to get a little worried:

I never heard from Linda again, and now her account is disabled. I can only hope that the 5 UPS men found a way to her, and saved her from whatever terrible threat kept her from completing her scam on me.

#5upsmen

#savelinda