It seems our Cameroonian pals have been busy the last year making their home domain (.cm) the riskiest place on the Internet, according to a report by McAfee.
Cameroon, a small African country that borders Nigeria, jumped to the number one spot this year with 36.7 percent of the .cm domain posing a security risk, but did not even make the list last year. Because the domain .cm is a common typo for .com, many cybercriminals set up fake typo-squatting sites that lead to malicious downloads, spyware, adware and other potentially unwanted programs.
There has been a spate of Cameroonian cybercrime articles in the past few weeks, but this one takes the cake:
A woman has been conned out of £400 and threatened with “black magic” after trying to buy a puppy on the internet.
Joanna French, 27, spotted an advert on the Sun Local website – branded like the national newspaper of the same name but run by Oodle, an internet classified service – and sent the money expecting to receive the new dog.
When it didn’t turn up and she complained, she was threatened by a gang operating out of Cameroon and told “black magic” would be placed upon her.
She has taken her case to Vince Cable, MP for Twickenham, who is taking it up with the police, the Office of Fair Trading and trading standards.
Miss French, of Hampton, explained she wanted to get a new companion for her dog Ben, after her other canine, Tipsy, died.
She said: “There were lots of emails, it all looked quite legit. They had all the right things.
“I rang up the Sun Local but they told me it was my fault. Now the sellers keep ringing me up, even after I told them I would phone the police.
“They said if I didn’t give them more money they would put black magic on me – it is frightening, you don’t know what people are capable of.
“I know I won’t get my money back, I just want to warn other people.”
Black magic. Big juju. Nice touch. Real high class, fellas.
In other Cameroonian cybernews, US copyright lawyers are warning about possible typosquatting in the Cameroonian Top-Level Domain (TLD), “.cm” (dot-cm).
In another story, a woman found her own child “for sale” on CraigsList in a Cameroonian adoption scam. This was something of a non-event as it appears the scammers did nothing more than lift a cute family picture from the woman’s FaceBook account.
My original post about Cameroon on my UT99 blog has attracted a bit of converstion, ostensibly from Cameroonian scammers/hackers themsleves.
Here is one of the most recent:
This is papa Dollars. I do enjoy your proxies and indeed they are very helpful. I pray God keeps you alive and that you have many more days on earth like President Biya, so as to continue providing proxies for us. Stay Blessed and continue with your hard work.
Awwww… isn’t that sweet?
I could be the Patron Saint of Puppy Scammers if I could pull off a miracle or two.
It happened around 9:30PM EST on the 29th.
It’s been a long march since the first million, which happened in August 2008. That took five months and it only happened because the original Google Hack stumbled across a single file with over 700,000 (dead) proxies in it.
The site is finally getting some traffic, even though most of it is still from Cameroon. Here’s the latest:
Very cool. Traffic nearly doubled since May. I find this odd since, according to “general wisdom” on proxies, traffic drops off during the Summer months when kids are out of school. Of course, with Cameroon Puppy Scammers driving 60+% of the traffic, the List bucks the usual demographics.
Iran, which made a lot of proxy news in the last month, pretty much ignored Hinky. They checked in at #43, with only 97 unique users.
Well, screw them anyway!
Once again, Cameroon tops the list.
I wonder if they’d be interested in Hinky Dink tee shirts and coffee mugs?
This comment was posted at my Unreal Tournament Blog, in response to my post about my Cameroonian users (nearly 60% of all visitors to the List)…
hello Mr Hinky i understand how you feel and think about cameroonians well you see let me let you know more……think of a child who just completed his secondry school studies after loosing his parents and sponsoured by his uncles who now turn the world on him and in this situation he tries to get him self to the university and only ends up seeing he can’t affored his fees and rents. one day he notices that an hour or 2 spend at the cyber can earn him hundreds of thousands …that with you help(hope you understand what i mean) so should he just go outside there and hold a gun pointing at inocent people at night and even ending up killing some who say they have no cash on the for real ..or should he just sit calmly at the cyber dtore and AVENCHE our 4fathers for the meseries and pains put upon us…while regarded by the scammed(Europeans) as Slaves times back….well living a luxury life is normal for the well living, better still not all scammers leave that way …i won’t encourage them but i will say those are poeple who only are victims of circumstancies and i think think all they need is Employment of which the government is backholding…..so you see her in cameroon not the scammers are to be blammed but the government for being the cause-effect. anyway thanks to you for solving the problem of unemployment here for use and i know by his grace one day i will change from my deeds……and become a person who can boost to create jobs oppotunities in his county and limit the rate of scamming…..if you could me me score my goal quicker then i think i can then contact me at : [deleted]@yahoo.com …..for any advices and maybe talks like a child to father issue…..cause i have no parents am 19 and living a life from hand to mouth. but sure to achive my dreams someday……thanks for the patience to read all through if you completed stay wise and meet your goals too in life….Allino€
You meet the most interesting people running a proxy list!
