Hitman Payoff Scam Email

Summary:
Email claims that the sender has been paid to terminate you but he will cancel the contract if you pay him a large sum of money (Full commentary below).



Status:
False - The email is an attempt to extort money.

Example:(Submitted, January 2007)


Commentary:
This email claims that a hitman has been paid $50,000 to "terminate" you. According to the message, however, the hitman will cancel this contract and spare your life if you pay him a large sum of money. The message claims that "a friend" ordered the hit, but after following you for over a week, the assassin is now convinced that you are innocent and is therefore willing to let you live in exchange for a substantial payout.

However, the email is nothing more than an attempt to extort money. The scammers hope that the fear generated by such an overtly threatening message will be enough to convince the victim to pay up. With such large sums of money involved, the scammers would only have to con one victim to make the exercise worthwhile. The specified payout amounts in the emails may vary. In the example shown here, the "hitman" demands $80,000 overall with an initial instalment of $20,000. The scammer has hit pay dirt even if he only manages to extort this initial $20,000 before his victim wakes up to the scam.

In December 2006, the FBI issued the following alert about these scam emails:

E-MAILS CONTAINING THREATS AND EXTORTION

12/07/06—We have recently received information concerning spam e-mails threatening to assassinate the recipient unless the individual pays several thousand dollars to the sender of the e-mail.

The subject claims to have been following the victim for some time and was supposedly hired to kill the victim by a friend of the victim. The subject threatens to carry out the assassination if the victim goes to the police and requests the victim to respond quickly and provide their telephone number.

Warning! Providing any personal information can compromise your identify and open you to identity theft.

If you have experienced this situation, please notify your local, state, or federal law enforcement agency immediately. Also, please notify the IC3 by filing a complaint at www.ic3.gov.

A variation of the same basic scam in which emails claimed to be from the FBI in London, prompted a second FBI alert in January 2007:

NEW TWIST CONCERNING THREAT AND EXTORTION E-MAILS

01/09/07—There is a new twist to the IC3 alert posted on December 7, 2006 regarding e-mails claiming that the sender has been paid to kill the recipient and will cancel the contract on the recipient's life if that person pays a large sum of money. Now e-mails are surfacing that claim to be from the FBI in London. These e-mails note the following information:

* An individual was recently arrested for the murders of several United States and United Kingdom citizens in relation to this matter.
* The recipient's information was found on the subject identifying the recipient as the next victim.
* The recipient is requested to contact the FBI in London to assist with the investigation.
* It is not uncommon for an Internet fraud scheme to have the same overall intent but be transmitted containing variations in the e-mail content, e.g., different names, e-mail addresses, and/or agencies reportedly involved.

Please note, providing any personal information in response to an unsolicited e-mail can compromise your identity and open you to identity theft.

If you have experienced this situation please notify the IC3 by filing a complaint at www.ic3.gov.

Due to the threat of violence inherent in these extortion e-mails, if you receive an e-mail that contains personally identifiable information that might differentiate your e-mail from the general e-mail spam campaign, we encourage you to contact the police.

According to an article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the scam may be deliberately targeting professionals such as dentists. In a practise dubbed "spear phishing", scammers may target a select group that are considered to be prime candidates for a particular scam. In this case, the scammers focus on professional people who may be more likely to be in a position to pay the large sums demanded in the messages.

These scam emails are generally sent to a large number of people within a targeted group in the hope that one or more will respond and be drawn further into the scam. Thus, if you receive one of these messages, you should not reply or respond to the scammers in any way. As well as the direct attempts to extort money, the scammers may also try to harvest personal information from a victim so that they can steal his or her identity.

Since scammers send to a long list of email addresses, their initial messages are usually a generic, "one size fits all" template designed simply to elicit a first response. As the FBI alert quoted above notes, however, if the email is seemingly directed specifically to you and includes your name and/or other personal information, then you should certainly contact police.

References:
FBI - New E-Scams & Warnings
'Hitman' e-mails rattle recipients

Last updated: 18th January 2007
First published: 18th January 2007

Write-up by Brett M.Christensen