Jason's Log

Tracking Victor's Location

As mentioned in my previous reply, I do operate my own mail server, but I didn't even need to check the mail logs to know that Victor was not actually in London, England. Fortunately, Victor sent the message from a Yahoo! Mail account. If you've ever looked at the detailed mail headers for any of the web-mail systems (Yahoo! Mail, MSN Hotmail, GMail), you know that they typically include the IP address of the computer used to submit the mail message.

So quickly viewing the message source in KMail, I see the following:

Received: from [80.178.250.59] by web37809.mail.mud.yahoo.com via HTTP; Sun, 22 Jan 2006 11:16:13 PST

This, of course, is all the information that I really needed. I grabbed the IP address from that header, and using this IP Address Locator tool, was able to get an approximate location on my buddy Victor:

Country Code: NG
Country: Nigeria
Certainty: 85%
Longitude: 3.3960
Latitude: 6.4530

That puts Victor approximately here: http://tinyurl.com/bjq8b. So far, no further replies from him. Too bad. This was just starting to get fun...

See the previous entry in this thread for additional info.

Nigerian Fraud, the fun continues

Now comes the fun part. Victor promptly replies with this poorly written proposal on how the purchase will be made (apologies for the length of the excerpt, but you really have to read the whole thing to fully appreciate the humor in this):

Greetings........
Thanks for your mail and update.
I am very happy to tell you that we have concluded
with our client after the evaluation of the pics and
he has instructed me to carry on with the transaction
. He said that I should inform you that the payment
will get to you in a cashier check of ($33,200
USD)which is a refund payment of a cancelled order
earlier made by my client.
He informed me that he intends usg the refund payment
to pay for your vehicle .
Due to company policy, this check has to be made out
in this amount($33,200 usd ) to you, because company
policy only allows a refund payment on one cashier
check, so you are required to deduct cost of your
VEHICLE [($26,000usd] when the payment gets to you and
refund balance [ $7,200 usd] to my customer's Agent
VIA MONEYGRAM INTERNATIONAL MONEY TRANSFER, for the
agent to be able to offset shipping /pickup charges
,contracting of the Pick up Agent,taxes,commission
charges and any other handling bills.
After payment has reached you and balance sent back to
his agent - the agent will contact the PICKUP
AGENT-who will come for the pick up of the vehicle to
be shipped to my client.While title papers and any
other documents involve will be sent by you to my
client via FedEx courier service.THE PICKUP AGENT WILL
TAKE CARE OF THE FEDEX EXPENSES.
My client is making some necessary arrangemenmt with
some of the agent and will provide me with the
pickup/test driver agent as soon as he decides whom to
use as an Agent for the pickup of the Vehicle.
NOTE: MY CLIENT ADVISED THAT YOU ARE EXPECTED TO
DEDUCT THE TRANSFER CHARGES FROM THE REMAINING BALANCE
[ $7,200 usd] YOU ARE TO SEND DOWN TO THE AGENT VIA
MONEY GRAM INTERNATIONAL WIRE TRANSFER.
Please Confirm this whole arrangement and provide the
details below for check payment to be delivered to you
.
PAYMENT INFORMATION:
1.LEGAL NAME IN FULL.........
2.ADDRESS..........................
3.PHONE NUMBER(S).................
Regards
MR VICTOR MONTELLO.
67 St Marys Mansions
Maida Avenue
Little Venice
W2 1SY England
(44)704011124

So I sent the following to Victor, more or less calling his bluff. Note the very cheerful, friendly closing:

Wow. That is hilarious. Luckily, I operate my own email server and have been
tracking your location, IP address and origin of location.

How about this instead:

I don't care how the money comes to me. Personal check, cashiers check, credit
card (via PayPal). Once 26000 USD is in my personal bank account, I will give
someone the keys and title to the vehicle and complete the title transfer
according to California law.

So feel free to send that check, for 26000 USD, made payable to me. Once that
payment has been received, deposited to my account, verified by my banking
institution and myself, I will release the vehicle.

Until then, please do not waste my time.

Have a great day!
jason

See the previous entry in this thread for more information.

Nigerian Fraud, continued

After sending out my very quick, terse reply and expecting to never again hear back, I quickly received another message sent from Victor:

Greetings
Thanks for your response.I am a procurement agent
based in England and my client whom i am representing
is also in England. My client informed me that he is
buying the vehicle to present as a gift to the cousin
who
recently married in Canada . This means that the vehicle
will be shipped to Canada.
THE PRICE IS FIRM AT $26,000 USD..CONFIRM
Attach at least three recent pics( include the
interior) of the vehicle so that i will foward it to
my client for evaluation,The pics will make my
discussion with the buyer easier and faster.
Hope all the documents are complete...?
Any accident history......?
Are you the first owner of the vehicle.....?
Why do you want to sell the vehicle....?
My client is responsible for my commission,shipping
and any handling bills.
Looking foward to hearing from you soon so that we can
proceed with the transaction.
Regards
Victor Montello
67st.marys mansions
maida Avenue
Little Venice
w2 isy England
44-7040111242

At this point, I am laughing uncontrollably. But instead, I send the following reply:

Greetings:

The full set of images for the vehicle, which include both interior and all
sides of the exterior, are availble here:

http://www.buberel.org/gallery/v/homegarden/4sale/2003pilot/

The vehicle has never been involved in any accidents, as is mentioned in the
Classified Ad descriptions. Please read through the classified description,
as all of your questions are answered there:

http://tinyurl.com/b7a78

Regards,
jason

Again, I assume that this will be enough to send the fraudster after some other poor unsuspecting fool. I was wrong.

See the previous entry in this thread for more information.

First run-in with Nigerian fraudsters

Young and I recently decided to sell our 2003 Honda Pilot. We made the decision for a whole bunch of reasons (not so great gas mileage, not so fun to drive), altough we definitely would still recommend the Pilot to anyone looking for a mid-sized family friendly SUV.

Based on my previous experience with Yahoo! Autos (all very positive), I decided once again to use their auto classifieds site as the primary means by which to sell our Pilot. So on Saturday I took a whole bunch of pictures of the Pilot, and placed the ad on Yahoo! Autos.

Young and I had plans that evening (season tickets to the Peninsula Symphony series) to be at the Flint Center in Cupertino. Upon our return at around 10pm, I found the following email in my Inbox:

I am Victor Montello,a procurement agent based in Europe. I have a client interested in buying your automobile.What si your best price...? Regards Victor Montello.

Contact: Victor Montello
Phone: 7178691539
Email: victorcarshop@yahoo.com
Best time to contact: Anytime
Best contact method: Email

This message immediately started the alarm bells ringing. Yahoo! Autos was even kind enough to append, the bottom of the message, a warning about fraud schemes to be on the lookout for. I knew this was going to turn into one of those, so I figured I would play along to see where it went.

This was my reply:

The price remains as shown in the listing: 26000 USD.

Regards,
jason

Nutritional breakdown of my cheesecake recipe

Using the wonderful tool that is Nutritiondata.com, I decided to try and put together an estimate of the nutritional breakdown of my proven cheesecake recipe. I normally double the recipe, then divide it into 12 muffin-sized cheesecakes, so the I'm going to list to totals as well as the 'per serving' numbers below.

How to read these numbers:
100k = 100 kilocalories
100f = 100 grams of fat
100c = 100 grams of carbsohydrate
100p = 100 grams of protein

Crust:

2 cups almonds: 1100k - 96f - 38c - 40p
12 tbsp butter: 1200k - 132f - 0c - 0p
0.5 cups Whey protein powder: 300k - 7f - 5c - 55p
1.3 cups Splenda: 0k - 0f - 5c - 0p

Filling:

6 blocks cream cheese: 4800k - 480f - 48c - 96p
0.5 cups sour cream: 245k - 24f - 5c - 3p
2.25 cups splenda: 0k - 0f - 10c - 0p
8 eggs: 584k - 40f - 0c - 48p

Per Individual Serving: 686k - 65f - 8c - 20p

So for someone on a 2000 calorie a day diet who is following the generally recommended daily breakdown of calories, you've now used up all of your fat intake for the day, and then some.

If you used real sugar instead of splenda, it would bring the carbohydrate count per-serving to about 70 grams, and would increase the calories to about 910 kilocalories.

But damn, do they taste good.

Cornish Hens - First Attempt

For reasons not entirely understood by me, I grabbed a pair of frozen cornish hens at the local Safeway yesterday. I think it might have been the result of the following reasoning:

1. Young ate some really, really tasty roast duck at Chantilly on Christmas Eve.
2. Cornish hens are like ducks in that they are smaller than chickens.
3. Ergo, cornish hens should taste really good.

As faulty as that logic may be, I went ahead and checked out the Cooks Illustrated "Best Recipe" entry for oven roasted cornish game hens. The basic approach is brine for 2-3 hours, coat with extra virigin olive oil, cook breast-side down for 25 minutes, turn, and cook to temperature.

I also decided this would be a good time to try out the new wall oven's cook-to-temp feature. So I programmed it to roast at 400 degrees until the temperature probe reached 165. I turned the hens at about the 120 degree mark, and let them cook until the oven turned itself off. I then removed the roasting rack from the pan, and poured the remaining 1/3 of our bottle of Yellow Tail 2004 Shiraz-Cabernet (which was very good, by the way) into the pan. I scaped up the tasty bits to make a wine sauce out of what was left.

The results were amazing! The meat was very juicy and flavorful. Not a single bit was dry or overcooked. Young and I both loved it. The wine sauce probably could have been cooked down a bit, as it did have a slight alcohol-like flavor to it when served.

The nice thing about cornish hens (versus an entire chicken) is that their smaller size makes them easier to brine. I used a one-gallon ziploc bags, 8 cups of water, and 2 cups of kosher salt per hen for 3 hours and it was just right.

Definitely something we will try again, once we've polished off these leftovers.

Yahoo! Maps gone Flash?

I've been actively comparing and tracking the progress of the big-three on-line mapping tools for a while now (google, Y!, MSN). What was somewhat surprising to me was that Yahoo! has switched from a purely AJAX solution (XHTML  + JavaScript communicating with XML messages) to one that is based on a Macromedia Flash client.

To be honest, I like the Y! implementation much better than either Google's or MSN's. Flash just seems to provide for a much richer user experience than does AJAX, and does not appear to suffer as greatly from the cross-platform quirkiness of AJAX.

So for now, my bookmarks list them in preferred use oder: Y! -> MSN -> Google. If only Y! would add right-mouse-click support for adding your own map pins direction to the map (which MSN recently introduced), I would be one happy camper.

If Judy's book is doing this poorly in Silicon Valley...

Does it really have any chance of making it in the rest of the country? As mentioned in an earlier post, I really do like the idea behind Judy's Boook - a locally focused, social network orientated review site. Unfortunately, they don't seem to be getting anywhere near the critical mass of visitors or activity needed to make it successful. With almost no activity in Sunnyvale or Silicon Valley in the last week, does it really have much of a chance?

Seems not so likely to succeed to me. Has been removed from the bookmarks too. Sad.