
419 scam: Purporting Paul Graham - prakash
http://www.paulgraham.com/firstwatergatesltd.html
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mynameishere
Let us hope no literate people ever get into the 419 racket.

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tlrobinson
But then we wouldn't have cool new words like "Contactus"

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palish
If you've never seen a Contactus, you're missing out. They're really cool.
They grow in the badlands of the internet, surviving for weeks without water
or human interaction.

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pmjordan
Umm, shouldn't the link to the company be set up as rel="nofollow"? Having an
inbound link from paulgraham.com has got to boost your pagerank massively.

EDIT: oops, I missed the

    
    
      <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP">
    

tag, which will hopefully take care of it, although I'm not sure about its
placement inside a HTML comment. Will that work?

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pc
NOODP != nofollow.

[http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en...](http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35264)

 _One source we use to generate snippets is the Open Directory Project. You
can direct us not to use this as a source by adding a meta tag to your pages.

To prevent all search engines (that support the meta tag) from using this
information for the page's description, use the following:

<meta name="robots" content="NOODP">_

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crc5002
This information is correct, I'm not sure why you have been downvoted...

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run4yourlives
You know you've made it when... :-)

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hugh
Is it actually an attempt to impersonate pg qua pg, or just a random scam sent
with a plausible-sounding combination of first and second names? Has it been
targeted at founders, or is it just that founders are the only folks likely to
forward the email back to pg?

~~~
alex_c
>Is it actually an attempt to impersonate pg qua pg, or just a random scam
sent with a plausible-sounding combination of first and second names?

The same thought crossed my mind. Believe it or not, I used to know someone
named Paul Graham BEFORE I ever heard of pg... :p

~~~
michaelneale
So did I. Well the first and last names are common enough that its likely ;)

But that scam looks reasonably targeted.

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nazgulnarsil
you have to wonder. if these poorly written engrish 419 scams have been
successful enough to warrant the flood of them as well as all the media
attention, how much damage could one do setting up a truly legitimate sounding
one?

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tomsaffell
More damage, probably. But the thing is one would have to be well schooled in
English to write a truly legitimate sounding one, and that would probably mean
growing up in an English speaking country. That probably means that you live
in an English speaking country (or other developed country) so you _hopefully_
have some better options than being a scamster, and there is probably more
local law enforcement to stop you. That's the universe balancing things out -
not that I'm defending it _at all_. All that said, I'm sure some better
written scams do exist.

I wonder what the most convincing scams are (the ones for which some HN folks
would maybe fall)...

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markessien
Lots of english speaking countries are not developed.

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nanijoe
_Sigh_...here we go again. You do have to hand it to these people for doing a
little bit of research and going as far as to set up a website for their
"venture"

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ovi256
Yeah, you have to hand them 40% equity.

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vaksel
why are these things always so far fetched? If you are going to use Paul
Graham name, why not use YCombinator as your company?

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t0pj
Definitely targeting pg and not some random Paul Graham; they're even using
the "Y!" favicon on their site!

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charlesju
Lol, you know you have "geek street cred" when people are using your name to
try and con other people. While this kind of sucks, I wish I have your problem
someday.

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jws
The grammar! Please, blind me now before I read more.

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tlrobinson
Are random people getting these emails, or YC applicants? If the latter, how
are they obtaining applicants email addresses?

