For any restaurant or bar owners that may be lurking, the latest email scam has appeared in the following format:

Hello,

DINNER BOOKING

I am Engr Mark Adlard ,the director of Staff welfare Aiken Offshore United Kingdom . I want to book dinner for my group of workers arriving from United Kingdom . They will all come for dinner in your place as from August 27th 28th 29th , 2009 by 6:00pm each day. They are 15 in number. Get back with your response if there is availability in your restaurant.

Kind Regards,
Engr.Mark Adlard & CO


This is, of course, a scam. But if you receive it, please don't reply, even if you think you are being helpful by pointing out that you are not a restaurant or bar. Your response will flag your email account as an 'active account' for the email scammers and you will be inundated with junk mail.

You would have through that Mark Adlard who have a better grasp of the English language, considering he's an English science fiction writer from County Durham ...

John C

Thank you John xxxxx

I get these all the time at work. Normally end in "PAYMENT BY CREDIT CARD"

Yeh right!!!!!!!

YoAs a tip these scamails always seeming take a form. They use free emails services like hotmail or Yahoo. The have a mobile phone number as a contact and they never talk about the "name of the establishment, ie in your restaurant/hotel/accommodation. We write on a forum for vacation accommodations where there is a section for scamails.
If you subject a scam then usually googleing the name of the sender brings up something.

You can do one other thing that is to report it via this website http://www.spamcop.net/

The absolute best way to respond to emails that you are suspicious about (or even ones that you get some value from, but will flood you with solicited (since you contected them) adverts, is to open an account at http://www.spamgourmet.com
Briefly, once you have an account you will create a nickname - say "fred" on their system. You give them one of your legitimate email addresses[1] where they will forward the stuff you want, to.After that you can give out email addresses willy-nilly, safe in the knowledge that you'll only get a small number of replies from the recipient, any more will get silently thrown away by the spamgourmet system.

So for example, with your nickname "fred". When the spammer in the original example asks for your email address, just make one up with a name like
restaurant.5[email protected] Then any email they send will go to spamgourmet's system. Because you put a number in the email address, only the first 5 emails addressed to "restaurant ..." will ever be forwarded to you. If it turns out that their emails are useful, you can go to spamgourmet's website and allow all future emails through.
Because yo can make up new addresses at the drop of a hat (you don't need to register them or anything), you can have literally hundreds of different ones - one for each dubious contact! (I think my total is somewhere over 250 by now). Although I don't have any spam-filters on my computers, I only get maybe 2 or 3 SPAMs a week, in the couple of hundred legitimate emails I receive,

[1] you really should have more than one, single email address anyway, Sign up for a load of free ones, then get them all forwarded to your main address. Taht way if one of them does start to get a lot of spam, you can just delete it without losing everything.

Thanks very much for this. I received a very similar email:
As mentioned above the CREDIT CARD mention is prominent and perhaps a useful way to quickly guess it's spam/scam

Say what you want though but these spammers tend to know their market. Most spam I receive seem to be targetting bald, overweight men with impotency problems. How do they know?!



John C

Lmao. That was funny.