Word from the customer support folks is that this spammer is long gone.
Oh Crud! Now I’ll never get my cut. [sigh]
Guys and gals,
I am an administrator of an aviation forum. My task is admitting new members while keeping spammers at bay. Some days it feels like a full time job I should be paid for, but that is not the case. I’m very cautious about who I let in.
Simply put, do not respond to any unsolicited emails or PM’s. There are many phishers who place some bait out there.
Hopefully the mods have put this dude out of business.
I miss the BaC-111
Norm,
I think the traffic is high enough on the Kalmbach forums to make manual admission of new members impractical. The forums are set up to make it easy for newcomers to join and then join in the discussions, which is usually a good thing - this is the first time that I’ve been spammed in the nearly six years that I’ve been a member.
One possible way of keeping spammers at bay while encouraging newcomers would be to limit the pm’s to one per day for the first week after joining.
- Erik
P.S. It was blindingly obvious that the e-mail I got was a run of the mill Nigerian scam - OTOH, there have been a couple of cases where the scammers got scammed by their intended victim.
Here’s how the system is set up: Once you join these forums as a member, all your posts go into a moderator’s que, awaiting approval. Once the moderator looks at the post, he can approve, edit or delete it. A new member stays in moderated status until the moderators are comfortable that the new poster is on the up and up. At that point, the member’s status is changed to unmoderated, and his posts go directly onto the forums.
A fair amount of spammers and troublemakers get caught in the moderator’s que and sent packing before anyone else even sees their posts. I’d say something close to 99% of the junk gets weeded out before ever seeing daylight. But, like any system, there’s always some trouble-maker trying to figure out how to work around the established rules. When that happens, the powers that be then go and plug the latest hole in the fence.
Apparantly, the folks that set up the system didn’t see the need to moderate the PM’s of new members. Who saw that need coming? I guess with all that money needing to be liberated from Nigeria, this was bound to happen. As the moderator system is set up now, if someone misbehaves badly, the moderators can hide their posts in the moderator’s que until a Kalmbach employee can show the troublemaker to the door. Only a Kalmbach employee has the power to ban a member. In the case of what just happened, the moderators couldn’t put the new member on moderated status, because, as a new member he was already(still) there. All they could do was put up the bat signal, and wait for the exterminater to arrive.
When stuff like this happens, use the Report Abuse function to alert the moderators. The function is under the more button, upper right, by the reply button. Use any post to report it. Once you
Norris: Or anyone with more experience on puters than my turn it off and on - since I think most people probably opened the e-mail for obvious reasons - could there have been a nasty bug behind the e-mail? Something that waits and infects later?
Or would my anti-virus have taken care of it?
Mook
I’m not a 'puter expert, but I did stay in a Holiday Inn last night…[:-^]
As I see it, there is no problem. The e-mail I opened was from Kalmbach Publishing, alterting me to the fact that some dork dohene had sent me a PM. When I opened the PM, I was then on Kalmbach’s forum system, which would have to have anti-virus protection.
*full disclosure here- I’m a computer dummy. I asked our IT guy at work.
Oh great and powerful Norris/Murphy Siding (oh, you’re a former moderator …)
As the one who simply posted the problem on the forum initially, I do apologize for creating the public bru-ha-ha. I did not realize that I could use the “Report Abuse” button to report something not related to the post as hand (since our Nigerian friend had posted no posts), and couldn’t find any other non-post-related way of bringing it to someone’s attention.
Thanks for the clarification. I’m fairly new to this site (but I do love it!).
Ed Mezvinsky, a former Democratic Congressman from Iowa, is serving a seven-year sentence for fraud after getting caught up in a series of Nigerian e-mail scams.
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2006/12/father_of_chels/
Some people will take the bait.
Dragoman- No need to apologize. Truth be known, I had just read the PM myself. I tthen opened up the forum, with the intention of starting a sarcastic thread about Nigerian railroads, when I saw your thread. I just figured I could add some insight to the situation.
Truth be know, the guy never did mention what county- so I may have sent all my banking information to the wrong place anyway. [(-D]
I sent my info to the Island of Sodor.
Something about a rich railroad controller trying to bring his assets of steam power to the US but was getting held up by red tape…
… Which answers the question- who could possibly be dumb enough to fall for this age-old scam? [X-)]
Shortly after Mezvinsky’s indictment, psychiatrists diagnosed bipolar disorder.
Mezvinsky sued the drug manufacturer and his physician and friend, Dr. Brad Fenton, who prescribed the anti-malaria drug Lariam for his travels to Africa. Some reports suggest the drug might cause psychiatric side effects.
http://crab.rutgers.edu/~mchugh/nigeriamezvinsky.html
Better to blame your meds than base your defense on a twinke.
Relevant to nothing at all, Ed Mezvinsky is the father-in-law of Chelsea Clinton. He briefly represented Iowa’s most reliably Democratic district in the 1970’s. Since then he and his wife have been active in Pennsylvania politics.
Reminds me of this.
Brought to you by Holloran Grade. 
I received the email last Mon 9/26. A usless piece of walking human trash.
A non railroad topic, a non event, yet here it is still being discussed almost a week after the fact!
Yep.
Thanks Norris, very informative.
This was my first pm spam since joining several years ago, which is a heck of a lot better than my experience with e-mail… I did send a note to Kalmbach’s customer service, more to keep “dohene” from bothering others than as a complaint.
- Erik