The Advisory Boar

By Abhijit Menon-Sen <>

Schlumberger interview scam

I wonder how many prospective job seekers have fallen for this scam of paying a “refundable deposit” for an interview with Schlumberger.

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Spam sent through The Hindu web site

I just received a Nigerian scam email sent through some "forward this article" feature on The Hindu web site.

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Invitation spam from WAYN

I'm used to seeing (and deleting) "So-and-so invites you to social networking site du jour" mail. I'm used to seeing "Sorry! I didn't know they were going to send mail to all my contacts!" mail (what, did their asking for your addressbook not tip you off?). I'm used to people being surprised and hurt because I didn't accept their Orkut or Facebook invitations. I'm used to invitations from people I've never heard of, some obviously bogus. I've even become inured to invitations that say "Please reply, or so-and-so may think you're not their friend!" (followed by a sad little face, usually yellow). I treat all mail from social networking sites as spam more or less automatically these days.

But the following invitation from WAYN ("Where are you now") still managed to surprise me with its sleaziness in forging my name in the From field:

Date: Tue, 15 Dec 2009 02:11:25 -0000
From invitation@whereareyounow.net  Tue Dec 15 07: 1:28 2009
From: Abhijit Menon-Sen <invitation@whereareyounow.net>
To: Abhijit Menon-Sen <ams@toroid.org>
Subject: You have 3 messages, 1 add friend request
Return-Path: <invitation@whereareyounow.net>
Message-ID: <8873441c21fe63757b147fd8053100b4@whereareyounow.net>

Sorry, so-and-so. I'll never find out where you are now.

This is not a scam

I've seen scammers send mail from someone's account to ask for help, but I've never seen one reply to a mailing list to reassure everyone that it wasn't a scam.

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