Hay Scams and Hay Scammers
www.hay-scams.com
Submit a scammer's message.

(If you have found this page via a search engine, please go to the Home page and start from there).

By now I am assuming that you have checked the known e-mail addresses from the home page and still don't know for sure whether your purchaser is for real.  We can help you determine whether an e-mail is from a scammer.  We can not guarantee total accuracy. 

For questions, comments, suggestions or if you wish to submit the latest scam, please feel free to contact us.

To submit a scam message, please send us the scam message (with full headers) that the scammer has sent to you. . There is very little useable information in a copy of your message to the scammer.  We need the message that comes from him to you with the header information

How can I find the "headers" of the message the scammer sent to me?

E-mail program :

Outlook Express mail
New "Vista" e-mail. (simply "forward" the message to us)
Thunderbird mail
Gmail mail
Yahoo mail

You can go to "SpamCop" for details on how to find the "Headers" for lots of other mail programs :  http://www.spamcop.com/help_with_headers/

Notice ------ Mar. 28, '08:
We have logged 2 different Nigerian scammers going through the web site.  Future 'tools' and 'instructions' are now only available from us by e-mail.  We don't want to "educate" the scammers with this web site and make their life easier.

How does this web site know it's a scammer?

There is very useful information contained in the 'headers' of a scammer's e-mail. Often we can quickly determine the country of origin (like Nigeria).  We match header information with previous messages in the data bank.  The more the scammer writes back to you the more information we can gather.

The "Hay Scam" letters that hay producers submit increase the data base and keep the data 'fresh'.

Scammers use a template letter to send to prospective victims in their attempt to scam the Hay sellers. (see contact examples)  These template letters are 'copy' and 'paste' into an e-mail and then sent as a batch to a bunch of hay producers.  They have several more generic messages to use for each reply.  Often the generic message has blanks that the scammer can simply fill in the "Type of hay" and the "Dollar amount" or other comments.  (Thus you can often find an extra space around these entries where the word or number was 'pasted' in.)  (Example of a 'fill in the blank')

The fact that the scammer uses the same message over and over means that since we have a fairly large data base of scam messages, we often find the same wording being used with different names and e-mail addresses.  From this we can tag all the similar messages as Scams and pull out the various e-mail addresses and cross them with a new e-mail address.

Individual scammers tend to end up using a distinctive phrase or word pattern even when they change the wording for the next round of scam attempts.  We also try to track the scammers by matching these word patterns against previous scam messages.

The scammer's "Achilles Heel" (as far as identification) is the name and address of the person you are to wire the money to.  Each scammer has a very limited number of people here in the US who will pick up the money.  Once we get that name, we track backwards and tag all the e-mail addys and names as a scammer, and then cross check the names into past and future contacts.

What did you mean when you said "You can have fun with the scammers"?

More about that subject later!

www.hay-scams.com