Friend stranded abroad money scam

Hi everyone,

I'm not sure If I'm posting this in the right place, but has anybody ever received emails, supposedly from their contacts, claiming to be stranded abroad, been mugged, losing their money and passport and needing you to help them out? I know this is probably a different type of scam as its probably more to do with hacking, but I thought it's good to make people aware of it. I have found examples of where scambaiters have actually spoken to the hackers/scammers claiming to be friends, in the end one of the scammers admitted to be African and just needed the money. I think this is one of the worst type of scams as the scammer pretends to be someone we know and has fraudulently gotten hold of their details. I dont have the headers to the email, but I did save the email itself and posted it to my blog:

Vacation Mess (Help)
How are you doing? Honestly, I'm doing pretty awful! I’m with family on vacation in London,England and a lot of crap has been spewing.

We got mugged last night in an alley by a gang of thugs on our way back from shopping, one of them had a knife poking my neck for almost two minutes and everything we had on us including my cell phone, credit cards were all stolen,quite honestly it was beyond a dreadful experience for us but looking on the bright side we weren't seriously hurt or injured and we are still alive so that is whats important.

I've reported to the cops here and canceled all our cards,it appeared I had acted quickly enough or they almost would have succeeded in cleaning out my bank account. I'm really having some difficulties clearing our hotel bills and also need to pick up a voucher ticket at the counter for us to catch a flight back home in a couple of hours.

I was wondering if you could please loan me some money pending when we get things straighten out and I promise to refund as soon as we arrive home safely.

Write me back and let me know how soon you can get it to us asap.

Thanks!

Anna


Now I ended up emailing my friend, warning her her account had been hacked into and telling her to change her password, which I usually do, and I hear no more from the scammer/hacker. Either the victim has realised they were hacked and changed password, or the scammer/hacker realises they've been caught and dont dare to write again. However, this scammer was either the biggest idiot ever, or he was too desparate for money he didnt care who found out, because he ended up writing back, saying they were dead serious!!!!! This shocked me and put me off guard, but I came to my senses and stopped all contact with them. I did contact my friend a while later, whos account and ID had indeed been stolen by the scammer/hacker.

I know its probably different to the other scams here, but thought i might share to warn everyone in case you ever get an email claiming to be from your friend. Is there another board I should move this to?

The old stranded abroad scam whereby the trickster claims to have been mugged, been in a car accident and needs money to pay the hospital medical costs, got robbed, they're stranded at the airport and whatever other silliness of excuses they use is common. The text you published is interesting. have a look on http://www.securitybeacon.com/?p=360
Is the script looking familiar. Scam artists quite often do the old copy and paste whilst changing a few words but still basically the same.

Yes, very familiar Thanks for the link. I read the rest of the article, it sounds scary what they can do once they hack into your email account

Guess I'm lucky my 'friend' scammer was stupid enough to give themselves away, maybe they were trying to keep it as 'authentic' as the possibly could...I did feel tempted to write back and tell them that have been reported, but it would have been pointless, with the scammer constantly trying to convince me that they were actually my friend