14 DAY TRIAL // Late last week Zimbabwean Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Moses Mzila Ndlovu found out that his email was compromised and abused by scammers. Fraudulent emails were sent to all of his contacts claiming that he needed money to get back home from London.
The "stranded traveler" is a typical 419 Nigerian scam, or otherwise known as advance-fee fraud. In order to trick people into sending them money, the scammers use a made-up story about someone in need of assistance, who lost their wallet and can't get back home from some remote location. The scam is even more believable if the messages are sent from the email of someone the potential victims know and this is why fraudsters constantly use hacked accounts.
The rogue emails sent out in Mr. Ndlovu's name claimed that he was stranded in London after having lost his travel and identification documents. The deputy minister's friends were being asked to help with £1,500 (around $2,300) that would pay for his transportation back to Zimbabwe.
Fortunately, it doesn't look like anyone took the bait. Instead, many called Ndlovu, who was in Bulawayo, the second largest city in Zimbabwe, at the time, to ask him about the messages. “I have received lots of calls from people seeking to verify the story. That is when I panicked and tried to access my email, but I failed,” the government official told reporters from The Zimbabwe Standard last week.
We don't know if there is any connection here, but Iowa State Senator Bob Dvorsky also had his email account broken into and used to send similar messages earlier this month. The scammers claimed he was stranded in London after misplacing his wallet. Being a US Senator, the fraudsters were more greedy and asked for a £10,000 loan that would allegedly cover his hotel bills and plane ticket.
“It's still of some concern that the email account of a fairly senior politican was broken into, and that malicious hackers were able to access his address book and email archive. There's no telling what information could have been stolen that could be of assistance to identity thieves,” Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, commented in regards to the incident involving Zimbabwe's Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs.
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