Feature

Scamming for Storage

Ezine

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If you've checked your inbox any time in the last five years, you've probably noticed e-mails from African countries promising money in exchange for help in getting millions of dollars out of those countries. "Help" consists, ultimately, of providing a bank account number to these total strangers.

Apparently, appeals to pure greed haven't worked well enough, so at least one scam artist is now dangling a carrot even more attractive than money: disk drives. One of this magazine's editors received an e-mail "due to the good recommendation giving to your company by one of our business associate in UK" [sic] offering 500 disk drives at attractive prices. The e-mail contained more of the same fractured language that the dozens of variants on the original scam has. Requests for payment info were frequently repeated over the course of several e-mail exchanges.

The disk drives, purportedly, are 7,200 rpm, 40GB Maxtor disk drives for $55. Maxtor's DiamondMax Plus 8 model retailed for $70 at CDW last month, so we can only imagine how storage managers will swoon at the prospect of such savings. How long before RAID controllers and Fibre Channel switches become the bait? Apparently, people will do anything for storage...

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This was first published in October 2003

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