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 Technology News | May 2008 
Tragedy Begts Scam - Email Abuses Flight 261 Memory
 Stephen Nellis - Pacific Coast Business Times
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More than eight years after one of the deadliest plane crashes in California history, Alaska Airlines Flight 261, scammers have resurrected the list of victims as part of a global email fraud.
The ploy, which was circulated in the Tri-Counties in recent weeks, uses the name of John Cuthbertson, a Danville man killed along with 87 others on Jan. 31, 2000, when Flight 261 crashed into the waters off the coast of Ventura County. In a variant on the ubiquitous “Nigerian” email fraud, the scammers included a legitimate link to a list of victims in a story posted on CNN.com.
Experts say the scammers may have targeted the Tri-Counties because its residents are likely to recall the crash, even nearly a decade after the fact.
“It could be a way to see if the consumer is going to bite,” said Craig Butterworth, a spokesman for the National White Collar Crime Center, which helps law enforcement agencies investigate spam and other online fraud. “It’s a good way [for scammers] to get their foot in the door.”
Butterworth said the Flight 261 spam follows a disturbingly familiar pattern. The sender poses as a foreign lawyer, telling the recipient that Cuthbertson has left behind $15 million in an offshore bank account. The fake lawyer says he needs the recipient to pose as Cuthbertson’s next of kin to free the cash from the account and requests personal information. The message uses strained English.
“Before the incident he has Fifteen million US Dollars ... in one of the Finance Company abroad and now over few years I don’t know any of his relation to present as next of kin,” the email reads.
Flight 261 took off from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, destined for San Francisco and Seattle. Nearly a year later, investigators concluded that a lack of grease on a part that controlled the pitch of the plane’s nose caused the crash.
Late last year, a similar email blast caught the attention of a journalist in Seattle, the home of many crash victims. Phuong Cat Le, who writes the “Consumer Smarts” blog for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, called the message “particularly distasteful.”
Scams like the Flight 261 message, which often claim to be from Nigerian businessmen, are called advance fee fraud or “419” scams, for the section of the Nigerian penal code that covers them. They predate email. For 20 years, scammers have sent letters and faxes from Nigeria and other foreign countries.
Email has only expanded the schemes’ reach. The U.S. Secret Service, which prosecutes such crimes, has traveled to West Africa in the past to investigate.
Both the documented Flight 261 spam messages ask only for information that’s often publicly available – such as a name ,telephone number and address – rather than bank account or Social Security numbers, which most people won’t give out to strangers. Because the sender asks for no sensitive information and includes a legitimate link, recipients might be more easily fooled into replying.
“They’ll come after that sensitive information eventually,” said Butterworth.
People in Ventura County or Seattle who remember the Flight 261 crash and its victims might be tempted to hit the reply button to criticize the spammers for their callousness.
But they should never do so, even to tell spammers they’re not interested, according to the Secret Service.
Often, scam senders blast emails to hundreds or thousands of addresses from public servers, without knowing who the recipients will be. They don’t yet know the recipients’ addresses, so they wait for responses to gather prospective victims.
Law enforcement can trace emails back to an Internet service provider and ask for a warrant. But con artists often work with a proxy server between themselves and the service provider, making tracking down spammers difficult.
The most recent incarnation of the Flight 261 message came from an address at Sify, an Indian Internet services company that’s publicly traded in the United States and similar to Yahoo! and other Web-based email carriers.
Joe Wein, a software developer and anti-spam advocate based in Japan, has blacklisted the sender’s address as a spammer, adding it to an online database of offenders.
Online auction fraud – think of an eBay transaction gone bad – accounted for about 36 percent of Internet fraud complaints to the FBI in 2007. Nigerian email schemes, by contrast, make up slightly more than 1 percent of Internet scams.
Soliciting a financial transaction by email is not in itself a crime, according to the Secret Service, and investigations are tough and usually come about only after a substantial loss.
Local law enforcement plays a minor role, if any, in combating email fraud, said Gregory Brose, a supervising attorney in the Ventura County District Attorney’s Office who oversees some of its online crime-fighting efforts.
The spam senders are usually out of county and state prosecutors’ reach, and money is better spent combating cyber criminals who can be prosecuted locally, such as child pornography offenders.
“There are so many email scams going around that it’s like trying to take a drink out of a fire hose to take a look at them,” Brose said.
| • R E A D E R S ' C O M M E N T S •
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I believe the scammers involved have tweaked their scam because just recently I received an email that very suspiciously fits the description of the scam you wrote about in your May 2008 online issue. I have not responded to this suspicious email, nor do I plan to do so, and I have taken measures to notify people I know about this email. Thank you for notifying the public of this, it seems to be a new twist on email scams I received in years past.
- Erin Soderquist |
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