Snail mail crap

[craigt]

I was kind of amazed to get one of these things in snail mail as an international mailing. Marked the front of the envelope as "mail fraud" and forwarded to the postal inspectors -- maybe they can accomplish something with a physical mail?

[turetzsr]

...Probably not but worth a try -- good luck!

[Farelf]

Yep, pre-dates the internet and still going strong - physical mail scams mentioned several times in these forums. Perhaps more wide-spread is the 'el Gordo' lottery scam, again an advance-fee + phishing fraud. Last examples I got were several years ago, a succession of them all postmarked Malaga, Spain (I would like to think the name comes from mal = "bad" + agalla = "gall/impudence" but I suppose not). In this jurisdiction, Consumer Protection will alert the general public to the dangers of responding. They have also been known to organize interception of the stuff through the Post Office. Alerting Postal Inspection (and providing the material received as a sample) is certainly a good idea too.

The good things about it are, it costs the scammers actual money to conduct these "campaigns" and there is nothing like the scale of distribution routinely achieved by the e-mail equivalent.