Anybody ever heard of saprizo.com?

December 1, 2004 2:10 PM

[scamfilter] Anybody ever heard of saprizo.com? [+]

(self link) I wrote about it here, but there are far more readers here. Basically they've got a slightly new angle on scamming. They tell me I've won a prize (in a contest I didn't enter) but I need to pay for the shipping.

With a debit card. And I need to provide them my card number, expiration date, and PIN. Does this sound fishy yet?

As of the time I am posting this, saprizo.com is unregistered. How can there be a site there, and is there anything I can do about all of this?

posted by codger to computers & internet (14 comments total)

spamcop it, it's a phising scam.
posted by dabitch at 2:13 PM on December 1, 2004

This question is phrased so awkwardly, that it took me 2 minutes for me to figure out that it isn't really a question at all. This would be more of a blue post, except that it would suck in the blue, too.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 2:16 PM on December 1, 2004 [1 favorite has favorites]

Okay, let me rephrase. These are scammers. Nobody's ever said anything about them, nearest I can tell. So, um, discuss.

I just registered for spamcop. I hadn't thought of this as a conventional phishing, since it wasn't spoofing/pretending to be another legitimate place.
posted by codger at 2:18 PM on December 1, 2004

"So, um, discuss."

No. Please do not use Ask Metafilter for this. Come back when you have a question.
posted by majick at 2:19 PM on December 1, 2004

GoDaddy says it's registered, but won't show the account details.
posted by smackfu at 2:27 PM on December 1, 2004

majick: I see a bunch of question marks up there.

(Has) Anybody ever heard of saprizo.com?

Does this sound fishy yet?
Feel free to ignore this one. It's somewhat rhetorical, in retrospect. Kinda funny, though, since I didn't immediately recognize this as phishing.

saprizo.com is unregistered. How can there be a site there?
And it would seem now that the information is starting to percolate around. Still, how can this be? I always figured that being able to get to a domain by name meant it was already in DNS.

is there anything I can do about all of this?
dabitch knocked this one out of the park, but I'm still open to more ideas too.

Basically, I could find nothing at all about saprizo, so I wrote about it. I then realized that my five readers were nothing compared to the thousands here, so I posted the question here.

This was something that interested me and I asked about it. If that's not what askMe is for, perhaps I should stay away.
posted by codger at 3:27 PM on December 1, 2004

Indeed.
posted by CunningLinguist at 3:47 PM on December 1, 2004

Indeed.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 4:02 PM on December 1, 2004 [1 favorite has favorites]

If it smells like a fish, slaps like a fish, claps like a fish and then asks you for your account information then its almost certainly a scam. Throw it back but rip the hook out to teach the bastard a lesson.

Do you really think there are companies that make money by giving away expensive items for free?

And how much was the shipping? Like $15 for a $2 package? Did the turnip truck just turn the corner so I didn't see it or what?
posted by fenriq at 4:05 PM on December 1, 2004

Anybody ever heard of not-so-sly attempts to weasel around the no-self-link rule? [-]
posted by ook at 4:11 PM on December 1, 2004

my card number, expiration date, and PIN.

Never give your PIN to anyone. Not your bank, not to your teenage kids and certainly not a website. They have no legitimate need for it. On earth. At all. Ever.

HTH.
posted by dash_slot- at 5:20 PM on December 1, 2004

I think that if codger had phrased the question(s) a little better and refrained from posting a link to his stuff, there would be nothing wrong with this as an ask.mefi post. My hunch is that there is no malicious intent here, but that it may have come across that way do to seeming haste with which codger's questions were written.
posted by spaghetti at 9:25 PM on December 1, 2004

Thanks all. Incidently, five other people have stumbled across my link and commented that they received the same code. Clearly their three winners a month is a lie, and gee golly I bet the whole site is a scam.

Spaghetti, please accept my apology for self-linking, but I didn't want to paste all that here and, as I mentioned, nothing else out there mentioned the site that I could find.

As for the haste, for that too I apologize. There's a lot of stuff that makes sense to me that doesn't sound right to the rest of the world. Maybe that'll be my New Year's Resolution: to write clearer questions. And maybe I'll stick to only two question marks too.
posted by codger at 8:22 PM on December 2, 2004

I was mostly trying to defend you from what was starting to sound like some pretty harsh criticism that seemed to me to have come from a misunderstanding, so no appology is necessary from my point of view.

I also appreciate your intentions in trying to warn the community about something you saw as a threat, a quality that I find quite laudible in a fellow 'fite.
posted by spaghetti at 10:44 PM on December 2, 2004