Spam ... or an Oz cacher in distress?

[EuDes]

Did anyone else get this particular e-mail?:
___________________________________________
I really hope you get this fast. I could not inform anyone about my trip, because it was impromptu. I had to be in Spain for a program. The program was successful, but my journey has turned sour. I misplaced my wallet on my way back to my hotel after I went for sight seeing. The wallet contained all the valuables I had. Now, my passport is in custody of the hotel management pending when I make payment.

I am sorry if i am inconveniencing you, but i have only very few people to run to now. i will be indeed very grateful if i can get a loan of 1500 Euro from you. this will enable me sort my hotel bills and get my sorry self back home. I will really appreciate whatever you can afford in assisting me with. I promise to refund it in full as soon as I return. lemme know if you can be of any assistance. Please, lemme know soonest. Thanks so much.
cheers
Linda Broschofsky
__________________________________________

It came directly to my Inbox without any salutation and the e-mail address was given as tronador1@... The thing is, I've never met tronador and only know of her from these forums!

There were no links to click (phew) but it certainly sounds a helluva lot like spam to me .

[GammaPiSigma]

Sounds like Spam to me.

[caughtatwork]

SCAM, not spam.
If it's a yahoo email address, please contact tronodor and let he know her email may have been compromised.

[EuDes]

Yep, it's a Yahoo address (as is mine). I don't want to reply to it though. Should I do a cut-&-paste of it and contact her through her GC account?

[Damo.]

I got the same message this morning and messaged her on Facebook to say it looked like her email account had been hijacked.
As caughtatwork said, it's a scam. Anyone that replies will most likely be given western union account details to transfer funds to.

[Richary]

I got the same and emailed her through here. How we all ended up on the mailing list I don't know, I wouldn't have expected my email address to have been in her mail account but maybe it is.

I did also check and there aren't any cache finds logged for Spain, so I would say she is definitely not over there

I wonder if she has a Playstation account?

[Renroc]

I got the same message this morning and messaged her on Facebook to say it looked like her email account had been hijacked.
As caughtatwork said, it's a scam. Anyone that replies will most likely be given western union account details to transfer funds to.

I got the same message today and I don't have a yahoo email account.

[caughtatwork]

tronadors Yahoo email account has been compromised.
Anyone she had in her contacts folder is probably getting the email.
You don't need a Yahoo account, you just have to had contact with the compromised account.

[Richary]

I had a PM back from tronador confirming the account has been hacked. However she also confirmed that I wasn't in her address book at that email (or in fact any, we have only ever corresponded via here or GC PMs). So exactly how the scam emailers managed to get the addresses to send it to is another question. And from the sound of it other cachers also got the email who have never met her.

[pjmpjm]

Yes, I've received two of these e-mails in the past year.

It's definitely spam.

[Zalgariath]

I like that Richary first checked up on cache finds to track her location...

Me, even if it hadnt been an obvious scam spam would know Ms Tronador as a teacher whould never had had such poor English and grammar hahaha

[Renroc]

I had a PM back from tronador confirming the account has been hacked. However she also confirmed that I wasn't in her address book at that email (or in fact any, we have only ever corresponded via here or GC PMs). So exactly how the scam emailers managed to get the addresses to send it to is another question. And from the sound of it other cachers also got the email who have never met her.

I have had no communication with Tronador to the best of my knowledge. Only via reading messages here. So I am one of the people mentioned in Richary's post above.
Not complaining just helping sort the source possibly.

[Alansee]

I have received this scam message a few times from different "people".

It is also quite possible to set up emails with a different return address, so tronadoor's email account may well not be the one(s) compromised.

[blossom*]

This is scary, especially not being sure what the connection is.

[tronador]

First of all thank you to everyone who contacted me to check that I was Ok. I can assure all of you that I am not in Spain and I am not in trouble. You can always rely on caching to leave behind a caching trail. Richary was not the only cacher to check if I'd found any in Spain .
I received the same email from someone I knew about 1 month ago. I never replied as I knew it was a scam, then yesterday my account was hijacked. If you received one of these emails the only advice I can give is change your password. I didn't do this because this has never happened to me over all the years I'd had the account.
I have no idea how the email was sent to people not in my contacts list. The most annoying thing is that they have stolen all my contacts, its empty and they also hacked into the gmail account after another friend tried contacting me on a different email account by forwarding that same message.
I traced the email to Lagos, in Nigeria. It's a money laundering scam and that particular friend had a conversation with the scamers thinking they were me. They gave him a Western Union address in Barcelona Spain. Needless to say I have totally lost my username and password on gmail so can't even get into my online photo album. I managed to change the yahoo password before they totally stole the entire account. I have removed the account from GCA and GC.com so any future communication from here will not be via yahoo.
I also realised any replies to me on yahoo were not coming to me. So I investigated a little further and under options and mail forwarding I could see that they had inserted a very sneaky email address that looks similar to my own and matched that in the source headers. So I've now deleted that and voila, mail is now being returned to me. No thanks to Yahoo, they have not helped at all.
Now I assume my gmail account is lost forever. Google has been no help either.
So check all your settings and make sure your reply mail has not been tampered with because you would never know, you weren't receiving anything in return.