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Katrina Internet Scams
Today my wife got a letter from Africa. Seems like there was this son of a famous industrialist. He inerhited a lot of money, and didn't know what to do with it. It sounded like quite a dilemma.
Those Africans are always in a mess -- getting killed by car wrecks, sabotage, shot by Elvis. And it seems that somehow there is always a lot of money involved that the poor saps don't know what to do with. I feel sorry for them. Somebody should set up a support group for rich confused people.
Just like any other event, the internet is already alive with scams.
From the Washington Post, "Web sites claiming to collect donations for Hurricane Katrina victims. Phony e-mails pretending to solicit money from well-known charities. Online auctions of Internet domain names with Katrina-related addresses, such as "katrinaourtsunami.com."
Less than two days after the hurricane, Internet opportunists are already trying to cash in on public sympathy for Katrina's victims.
Within the past 24 hours, several Web sites have emerged, promising to forward money to relief workers. Bearing such names as Katrinahelp.com, katrinadonations.com and katrinarelief.com, the sites ask for money to be sent through Paypal, but there is no way to verify who is getting the money."
If that isn't bad enough, legit businesses who are trying to give money to help the victims are finding out that PayPal makes it almost impossible:
"The basic gist of what happened is that Something Awful’s owner decided to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina by taking donations from his website. These donations all went to a PayPal account that he had set up and planned on using to donate the money directly to the Red Cross. The reason he took donations into his intermediary account, he says, is that “[he] could collect the names and addresses of each donor and send them some free Something Awful merchandise for their contributions.� Since Something Awful is a very popular website, the donations started pouring in and topped $30,000 in the first 9 hours. After that, PayPal caught on to the huge amounts of money flooding into the donation account and decided to freeze it. This locked the owner from using the account to either send the money to the Red Cross or accept any more donations. His plan was literally dead in the water."
You can read the whole story here, which ends with nobody getting any help, United States donors getting their money returned, and foreign donors losing their money -- PayPal kept it.
Makes you wonder who the REAL scammers are, doesn't it?
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