Potential Scam: Mr Yang, Bank of China

Apparently-From: M.H. (wepsprex@tin.it)
Subject: [Bulk] RE : Very Important Information
Reply-To: yminghua76@gmail.com
Addressed to Me: yes

( Scam content under fold )

I'm listing this one as a potential scam because of the lack of details in there, and because it's appearing out of the blue. Essentially, this one is chumming the waters, fishing for email addresses where someone is "listening" and hopefully curious about the proposal being hinted at. If you reply, your email address is going to be sold on as a "valid" email address, or even better still, as an email address where this sort of thing is read, believed, and followed up on. (Congratulations! You will have just gained the reputation of being a good target for scammers.)

Me, I'm mostly curious why the Business Relationship Manager for the Bank of China in Hong Kong's investments unit would be contacting a suburban housewife in Australia via bulk email, and why the return address I'm supposed to reply to them at is a gmail throw-away address. But I can live without those particular curiosities being satisfied. I suspect the prospect involved would be one of those intriguing offers to have my bank account hoovered out, to do work laundering money for criminal interests, or have my identity stolen, and I'm not overly interested in any of those options. As always, the best tools for resisting scammers are a sense of perspective (an awareness of your place in the scheme of things - why would they be contacting me about this rather than someone else?) and a sceptical mindset.

Potential Scam/Virus Vector - MailerUpgrade.Moonfruit.Com

Apparently-From: anabon@huincacoop.com.ar
Subject: Attention: E-mail User
Reply-To: no-reply@accounts.upgrade.com
Addressed to Me: Possibly ("To:" is "undisclosed-recipients:;")

( Scam content under fold )

I'm not sure what the heck is up with this one. I suspect the idea is you go to the address listed, and immediately start getting targeted by loads of viruses, or by demands for money to "upgrade" your account. Since I don't have an account with moonfruit.com, and I certainly don't have an email account with any of the other domains listed, I haven't gone to look at it.

Mind you, a bit of fast googling shows Moonfruit is basically a free website vendor based in the UK, which has its own "build-your-own-website" service. So I suspect what we're looking at here is someone using a free web service in an effort to either run a scam, or spread a virus or target machines for a botnet or whatever.

If you've got one of these (and this one showed up in my actual inbox, rather than being bounced into the bulk mail section) it's probably best to ignore it. While I'm not sure what kind of scam the sender may be running (and I don't particularly care to find out) anything which comes out of the blue like this from someone I've never heard of isn't to be trusted anyway.

(I tend to collect most of my email via POP, which means I download it onto my computer at home and remove it from the account provider's server, so I know my main email account is highly unlikely to be running out of quota.)