Lads from Lagos cut off The lads from Lagos, and lots of other more deserving folk, have lost all internet access, thanks to the failure of a submarine cable linking West Africa to Spain and Portugal. Reports suggest Benin, Niger, Nigeria and Togo have all lost connections. Telcos are trying to find alternative routes, such as satellite links, but …
This is terrible news. I was so close to receiving the £38,000,000 that a kind gentleman in Africa found in my dead great grandad's bank account that I never knew about after I paid him 'fore thosand us dollers' to release the funds. I hope these honest individuals get their connection back soon so I can get my riches, bitches.
I thought the actual source of these spam messages was a distributed grid of pwned hardware which are unlikely to be affected much by this outage.
Mind you, I'm sure I remember someone explaining how the internet was supposed to be able to repair itself magically by rerouting around breaks like this. Sounds like I've been sold a lemon. Where can I get a refund for this broken internet?
I received a letter yesterday (2nd class Royal Mail stamp - cheapskates) from "The Desk of Chun Duyi of the Nanyang Commerclal Bank, China. Apparently my last name matches that of a dead intestate depositor, and the kind Mr Chun Duyl wants to share USD 8.5M with me.
This Chinese bank official has, amazingly, 2 phone numbers actually based in HK, rather than Lagos.
If anyone has the energy to wind-up this twat (it's OK, big Dave says I can use that word):
t: +852-8170-1514
f: +852-3014-6379
chunduyi@yahoo.com.hk
Any volunteers?
Couple of cable in the med, few cables off south africa and one or two coming out of california under the pacific. Cut those buggers at the same time and it all goes very very wrong for the internet and global communications.
I love how an idea to make a really robust network, when implemented by the lowest bidder, becomes a creaking pile of crap with so many weak spots that a child of five could plan an attack to bring it down.
Don't always stay in Lagos. I recall a recent bust where all the 419ers were all illegal immigrants working out of internet cafes in Amsterdam.
I always rather enjoy my emails from the 419 crowd. Approached with the right frame of mind, they're a fun read. On the other hand I've never got anything but spam and hack attempts from China, Korea or Russia.
Is there any way of blowing them off the net? Please?
I wouldn't be too quick to mock Sergie, I'm guessing that your surname is fairly infrequent so maybe it IS a relative that you don't know about.
$8.5M US?
Got to be worth a try.
Go on.
You'd regret it if you didn't.
It's just there waiting for you.
Give it a call.
Signed,
C. Duyi
I am sure that your comment was posted in good faith, BUT....It was NOT an email.
Quote, with EMPHASIS:
"I received a LETTER yesterday (2nd CLASS ROYAL MAIL STAMP - cheapskates) from "The Desk of Chun Duyi of the Nanyang Commerclal Bank, China."
Unquote.
If you wish to take this up with 419baiters.com I will happily re-address the letter to you for you to scan and pass on. It could be amusing reading.
If you want to go for it, contact me at sergie.419.xoxy.net That's a disposable email address hosted by http://www.spamgourmet.com It's a terrific service. Send me your email address and we will take it from there.
Yrs Sergie
You're forgetting that they would have to dig them up and cut them in half to find out that they were fibre-optic lines...
=======================
Subsea cables are just laid on the sea-bed. There's no digging involved.
Also, packets can only take alternate routes where one exists. The Internet isn't designed so that every piece of equipment will always work all the time - it's designed so that individual equipment failures don't bring the whole thing down. If a SPoF actually fails then any equipment using that node will lose connectivity with the rest of the network.
is 419eater.com, not 419baiters.com (which is the site of a cybersquatter).
@Chris Pearson: You're protecting your email address too effectively. Post your email address openly on a few blogs, forums and social networking sites and the scam offers will come rolling in (along with the penis-enlargement, viagra, russian-bride and sex-aid spam). Do not do this if you value your main email address, perhaps use one of the spare addresses you get from your ISP or set up your own domain (Hotmail and Gmail filter such spam too effectively to be of much use for this, although you could set it to save all the spam in the junk folder and check that on a daily basis before it gets deleted). Have fun!
More fool the guys who've outsourced their Call Centres to Nigeria, Some companies have already had problems with the pay differential making Indian centres quite cheap to bribe, Fifty quid is a _hell_ of a lot of money to one of those guys. I can't imagine our precious consumer data would be particularly expensive on the Nigerian black market.
"Subsea cables are just laid on the sea-bed. There's no digging involved"
That all depends where the cable has been cut, if it is quite close to shore it was very likley buried (using trenching tools)
Actually "they" try to trench as much of the cable as possible to avoid easy cuts.
"This is terrible news. I was so close to receiving the £38,000,000 ... ."
Dear Mr Schofield,
Please read your information; I think you'll find they meant ZWD 38,000,000 (Zimbabwean Dolloars) which amounts to about £0.61 (really - check it out)..
Naturally this is subject to change and to surcharges and all other reasonable costs we can think up.
Sincerely yous,
. . .
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