Email Scam Alert

IFSD: Spells SCAM
By Trina L.C. Schiller

I received an interesting email the other day, that I almost deleted without reading. But, there was something about it that caught my attention. It wasn't the subject line, because all it said was, "RE: IFSD." It was the sender's name that got me...

The email was sent by someone named Simon Nicholas. The only Simon Nicholas that I have ever heard of is an artist. Hence my interest.

Well, this email was not sent by Simon Nicholas the artist, at least not the one known to me. This email was sent by a company who is supposedly offering employment, in the name of Simon Nicholas, General Manager of IFSD.

What is IFSD an acronym for? Well, according to the web site, it stands for: International Financially Scheme Developers Inc.

Do you see what I saw, when I looked at this?

The very first thing that caught my eye was the actual name. For starters, the company name is not grammatically correct. Then there is the word, " scheme." Why would anyone use the word, "scheme" in the name of a company that is related to financial transactions? That not only sent up a red flag for me, but a blaring alarm went off as well.

Upon further reading, I was struck by the illiterate fashion in which the site copy had been written. It appeared as though the copy writer has no real grasp of the English language, at least as it should be written. There were more than just typos in the copy; the sentence structure was not much better than if an elementary school student had composed it.

The actual content does not reveal very much about the company, except that they are an international financial exchange broker.

"We offer our services in order to improve the procedure of international money transfers.

We’ve been working in the financial sphere for 5 years, and we have gained wide experience for this period of time. In the beginning of 2005 we have opened our representation in the Internet and this helped us to get more international contacts.

Our nation-wide network has of a lot of branch offices in different regions of America and Europe.

Our company expands permanently its activity, open new branch offices and announce new hot vacancies. We aspire to provide the best service: to make it convenient, favourable and reliable.

Working with us, you can be sure that you will receive what you need! We’ll provide you with the conditions really favourable for you.

We have serious fair-naimed business associates.

We maintain business relations with many large-scale financial companies including major brands such as Western Union, Money Gram, Pay Pal and E-Gold. "

Copied and pasted directly from the site.

If you read through the whole site, I am certain that you will find yourself shaking your head and rolling your eyes. Whoever wrote this stuff must be extremely egocentric to think that the average person could not see through this crap. Did this person even complete high school?

Here is what they offer:

Our company offers the whole spectrum of financial services. We organize the most favorable schemes of money ordera. Our services can be useful both for organizations and private persons. We offer different services for different client categories.

To private persons: Financial instruments for the work at the auctions and with foreign companies. We shall create all the optimal conditions to make it easier for you to receive transfer funds from private persons and companies.

To the companies: We create foolproof schemes for international bank money transferring, help to open international accounts, open branch offices of your company abroad.
If you have any questions, please contact us!

Well, I did have some questions to ask them. I sent them an email with my questions, but have not yet heard back from them. I wonder if my questions were too hard.

They state that they work with Western Union, Moneygram and PayPal. Being that these are reputable companies, I thought perhaps I would contact each of them and ask what their relationship with IFSD.org is. Here is what the folks at Moneygram had to say:

Date: Thu, 15 Sep 2005 12:25:55 -0500 [12:25:55 PM CDT]
From: eMoney Transfer@moneygram.com>
To: "'triizine@ezines1.com'"
Subject: RE: MoneyGram Customer Service Request - RE: All Other Inquiries

Thank you for this e-mail.. This is absolutely fraudulent and we will do our best to investigate and shut this down...

-----Original Message-----
From: eMoneyTransfer@moneygram.com
[mailto:eMoneyTransfer@moneygram.com]
Sent: Thursday, September 15, 2005 8:54 AM
To: transcoord@moneygram.com
Subject: MoneyGram Customer Service Request - RE: All Other Inquiries

The following request has been received.

Customer Name: Trina Schiller
Customer Email: triizine@ezines1.com
Customer Phone:

Topic: All Other Inquiries
Reference Number: na
Description:
I received an email sales letter, for a business opportunity with www.ifsd-finance.com. On their web site, they claim to do business with your company. Can you please confirm this information?

There you have it... They lied.

I did some further digging and discovered that this exact web site is located at three different domains, each registered to a different person and running on different servers. Hmmm.

Furthermore, none of the contact phone numbers, listed on the site, correspond with any of the domain owners.

CONTACT US
Our main office is located in the Miami, USA, the direct telephone number is : Miami, FL 305-913-0009

Phones
Birmingham, AL 205-271-0700
South Bend, IN 574-383-0010
Warrensburg, MO 660-262-0007

domain: ifsd-finance.com
owner: Staci Lindelow
organization: Staci Lindelow, Inc.
city: Cumming
state: Georgia
postal-code: 30041
country: US
phone: 7707818531
admin-c: stacilindelow@yahoo.com#0

domain: ifsd-finance.net
owner: Chris A Benson
city: Harrisburg
state: NO
postal-code: 57032
country: US
phone: +605-5818735
admin-c: fds@hotmail.com#0

domain name:IFSD.ORG
created On:16-Aug-2005 21:19:55 UTC
expiration date:16-Aug-2006 21:19:55 UTC
registrant name:Jeff Coates
registrant city:Cumbria
registrant state/province:Cumbria
registrant postal code:CA11 9DP
registrant country:GB
registrant phone:+1.3103169600
registrant email:jeff_coates2004@yahoo.co.uk

Incidentally, the support phone numbers, listed the web site, all lead to fax machines. Yes, I dialed them all. What a disappointment. I was really hoping there would be a person on the other end to explain all of this to me.

Have you noticed something else through all of this? None of the contacts listed as domain owners is Simon Nicholas!

I also found some interesting information when researching the IP addresses for each domain. It appears that all of the IP addresses that are connected with these particular domains are heavily black listed for spam.

Although the spam police are very aware of these guys, it seems that no one else has heard of them. I searched Alexa, and they've never heard of IFSD. The only information I could find on Google, MSN and Yahoo, were references from the spam police sites. I can't say that I am too surprised though. After all, the domains were registered between 30-60 days ago. These days, it's easier to get black listed than ranked.

This web site screams STUPID! This scheme appears to have been created by some moron who assumes that the rest of the world is even more ignorant than they are.

Copyright © 2005
The Trii-Zine Ezine
www.ezines1.com

Trina L.C. Schiller : About the Author
http://www.trinaschiller.ws

Keywords: scams, financial scams, email scams, spam