Since Russian wife spam is on the rise, I’ll take this occasion to tell you a little story. An old colleague (let’s call him John) answered one of those messages about 2 or 3 years ago, just to see how things would go. The girl replied very quickly, and they soon began chatting about almost everything. John received a lot of email from her, including pictures. He suspected a scam, and his suspicions were confirmed when he recognized parts of Montreal his home town – in a few of the pictures. He patiently kept up the correspondence to see what would happen. It took over a month before she asked for money to come and visit him. One month: she obviously thought this was enough time to establish a trusting relationship and to alleviate any suspicions he might have.
How did the scammers do it? They used a free web email provider to hide their IP. So how do you track these guys down? You could try one of the following:
Create a website (or use a site where you can access the logs) and put a picture on it. Next, send the link to your future Russian wife and hope that she will click on it. If the link is clicked, you can get the IP. Unfortunately for John, it didn’t work because the link wasn’t clicked, even though she replied Hey, nice picture!
You could also try using an embedded link that connects to a website as soon as the email is opened, but due to browser/mailer security improvements, the links are usually blocked and request your approval. Another long-shot trick is to open the picture she sent you and examine the image properties. People often don’t realize that a lot of information is stored in the image file, including shutter speed, ISO, camera name, AND sometimes interesting info such as the Authors name, email and more. It’s a long shot because most software doesn’t complete these fields automatically, but it’s good to know they exist!
As a last resort, you could always take a picture of yourself at the exact same spot they did, and tell her that you just arrived in Russia – with the picture as proof!
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