In November of 2009, I pitched our video game, Ages of Athiria, to the Louisville Venture Club at the venture club’s monthly meeting.  What follows in this post is a transcript of an email conversation that seemed to come from a legitimate person willing to invest into our company.  Needless to say, when the second email arrived, I realized it was a scam and decided to follow it up to the decision point so that I could document this scam to help others avoid it.

It started with a rather innocuous email that looked legitimate enough to pass my internal scam alarms.  Here’s the email in question along with the message’s headers.

 

		 1: Received: from mail-bw0-f219.google.com (209.85.218.219) by
		 2: (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx) with Microsoft SMTP Server id
		 3: 8.1.393.1; Tue, 23 Feb 2010 19:30:55 +0000
		 4: Received: by bwz19 with SMTP id 19so3328668bwz.6 for
		 5: <derek (at)elysianonline (dot) com>; Tue, 23 Feb 2010 11:22:03 -0800 (PST)
		 6: DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed;
		 7: d=googlemail.com; s=gamma;
		 8: h=domainkey-signature:mime-version:received:date:message-id:subject
		 9: :from:to:content-type;
		 10: bh=NM9J9CizaA+V+BYQl9t00vrFCo+ZNiveVkh8fkpxGLs=;
		 11: b=l3TTPK0IAqTvyKyr7ZnnbO7OTTHlbZsiby5Pa3FTObWrCxK/xxpXRCVTkDMv1mNi9K
		 12: N+oE7cNbCta1ewXrzzuHSz1jRlRfZpBF/Lz8xk+VQcJEChzMbXG1PYMU90fLg6tHuoYh
		 13: iaB9mwXF3mtVOhFQR+a8qd4N9Tn05lZb6jHSw=
		 14: DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; c=nofws;
		 15: d=googlemail.com; s=gamma;
		 16: h=mime-version:date:message-id:subject:from:to:content-type;
		 17: b=lkEVdg6LRBIsQWfJxTbHvyMdq1y/Z03dRpMrr1vUl3XGuUjjOaJudMNpACt2AnbD7l
		 18: RC4LPgvNz92ce7Liwfbc39Qb5twViqKVjguL78e5Pfyfvv7mA6s0PMLgt5HrHJsseGac
		 19: F5+E5Y3ETHMciFJa7jUeEHz7bT4m9vR4UJNOc=
		 20: MIME-Version: 1.0
		 21: Received: by 10.204.39.200 with SMTP id h8mr3284089bke.97.1266952917893; Tue,
		 22: 23 Feb 2010 11:21:57 -0800 (PST)
		 23: Date: Tue, 23 Feb 2010 19:21:57 +0000
		 24: Message-ID: <4ec0a4da1002231121p588e6588i5cf2895782603692@mail.gmail.com>
		 25: Subject: Elysian Productions Inc. funding
		 26: From: Lesley Newland <newlandlj@googlemail.com>
		 27: To: derek@elysianonline.com

Aside from the grammar errors, it seemed possible to me that this could be an older couple or individual that decided to get into the angel market.  They found my name through the Louisville Venture Club’s web site.  I do have a post on that site outlining my pitch.  The email comes from googlemail.com which I verified to be the same as gmail.com.  This is readily seen in the headers above, complete with DomainKey entry and all.  All in all, it seemed legit so I responded.  Sans the reference to Louisville Venture Club, I probably would not have responded.

Even I can make grammar mistakes.  *shrug*  The next day I received the following response.  This response set off all sorts of alarms and is what prompted me to post this blog post.

The first sentence is written like a Nigerian money scam email.  They have not seen my executive summary.  They responded to their own email and not the response that I sent them. (not shown)  How could their investment portfolio manager give them consent to move forward with anything?  Grammar declines considerably in this email.  You would think that these guys make enough money to hire English speaking authors but for whatever reason they do not.  In this email, they’re telling me how their internal portfolio is performing poorly.  That makes me feel real confident.  What angel would tell you that they are not knowledgeable enough in sophisticated investments?  Anyway, I was a bit skeptical with the first email but not enough to not respond.  Enough looked right with the first email.  This one, however, screams scam.  That said, I responded.  I’m a glutton for punishment but figured I would see how far this rabbit hole goes before publishing it to save other Venture Club members a lot of pain.

As an entrepreneur, I’m optimistic to a fault.  I believe everything will just work out.  Back against a wall, check.  In need of large sums of money, check.  Recently announced publicly that he is looking for money, check.  Eager to find a solution to these money woes, check.  Easy prey is what we’re sometimes called and even the scam artists are beginning to understand this.  The thing about this is just how badly executed it was.  They at the very least had me strung along for the ride using the first email.  The first email used a reputable referral source, sounded legit, had decent grammar and managed to not raise huge scam flags.  For the second one to be so bad either points to the first one being a feeder for a default scam or the emails coming from different people.  I’ll never know but now you know and knowing is half the battle.