A week or so ago I got an email from someone claiming to be “Jerson Estandarte”, a recent high school graduate in the Philippines who needed money for college. This person was trying to reach someone else on campus, but I got their email since they sent it to webmaster@wou.edu.

I thought there might be a chance they were legitimate and just very naive; I looked around and couldn’t find any other examples of this kind of thing being a scam. So I asked them for some proof, and they got evasive, pretending to misunderstand my requests.

Finally when I asked them to mail actual paper documents to me, I got a reply accusing me of being unsympathetic and saying they would stop trying to contact me. At that point I figured the whole thing had been a scam all along.

I’m curious if anyone else has seen anything like this; it sounds like a new strategy.

By the way, for fraud information with a humorous slant, check out http://www.scamorama.com/.